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thank you everyone uh for joining me today on a quite an eventful day here in the us um so we'll as i mentioned there should be about a a half hour session uh it may take a little over but we'll we'll hopefully have some time for questions at the end again thank you for joining our webinar on how to choose a remote field monitoring system with you today i am richard rodriguez i've i joined onset about a little over a year ago so back in 2019 i've got experience in working with agricultural researchers and growers universities and environmental agencies for those of you not familiar with onset already we have been engineering and building uh data loggers and sensors here in our headquarters in cape cod massachusetts since 1981 we our products are have been deployed all over the world and are well trusted for their uh time tested reliability and quality we do have a global network of distributors so you can get our products pretty much anywhere in the world some housekeeping items this webinar is being recorded and will be available later in the next few days we will you will receive an invitation or a link from our marketing department so that you can access this webinar at a later time for anyone with any questions or in need of any help please feel free to enter your questions at the bottom of or the questions section of your control panel now we'll get into our webinar i'll cut my webcam to save the bandwidth and we'll get right into it so today we will uh do a brief introduction into field monitoring systems i'll discuss different uh tools that are available for for these systems and we'll get into the benefits of the remote monitoring systems for uh growers so farmers agricultural researchers or any other type of researchers really and briefly touch on indoor applications and then we'll get into the bulk of the presentation which is the factors to consider all right so why consider remote monitoring systems remote monitoring systems can help you can help you of course monitor uh any any area not close to you where you're you're able to log data immediately so the these are great for to provide you near real-time environmental data uh from anywhere in the world uh for hard to reach places um for web connected systems you can actually these can actually alert you of critical critical conditions specific at specific points in the field they can ensure data is getting collected and devices are running as expected because you can monitor them [Music] as you as they're deployed you can get a head start on research by viewing data as it's collected and you can plan for commercial settings growing perhaps you can plan your operations and priorities on the farm or greenhouse day to day for tools that are available the more common types of devices or sensors that we we sell with our remote monitoring systems range from soil moisture to temperature and relative humidity rainfall light sensors wind speed and direction leaf wetness barometric pressure water level evapotranspiration and pulse inputs that pulse input not actually a measurement but uh something that allows you to tie in other other products on on the farm looking at growers specifically our farmers benefits range from reducing costs associated with irrigation by allowing you to plan your irrigation plate based on plant demand rather than a set schedule uh you can protect crops and cattle from frost and excess heat you know that frost protection is actually a main driver for our product sales here in the northeast avoid wasting applications by applying pesticides when conditions are not suitable so you can you can monitor temperature and humidity to understand when when risk of pests may be highest or when the time for application is not it's not best these devices can help you ensure that you're meeting regulatory regulatory requirements when you apply pesticides so for example you can check wind conditions prior to spring out in california you can monitor your water usage uh to ensure that you are not uh using too much water or have any water losses that you're you're unaware of you can also monitor multiple points in wide areas quickly so with uh labor becoming scarce at times it's easier to to understand what's going on and cover a wide a large area of farm without uh having to actually go out to that that point uh and crop planting so with temperature measurements and at different points you can better understand where to plant specific crops based off of their susceptibility to to frost damage for example you can also plant plant harvests around the conditions the plants have seen we did talk about savings from spring and pesticide applications an example of of these savings uh for an example of these savings you can we can look at a 2017 survey of farmers conducted by newa or the network for environment and weather applications which found that farmers saved an average of forty three hundred dollars from reducing sprays up to thirty three dollars that would say from avoided crop losses on average farmers saved 2 000 over 2 000 per acre based on this and the cost of one of these systems you're looking at a payback period of under one year for someone with a an acre of farmland for research on the other hand this type of systems allow you to monitor remote sites that are difficult or even impossible to get to at times you can they help you ensure losses of data due to damage of devices because uh rather than the data being stored only on a on the hardware it's also saved in the cloud and for the sensor network so when we're talking not just about a single station but a network of sensors um it becomes a more cost effective way to monitor multiple points across a wide field which makes it easier to get higher definition of the conditions you're studying so these environmental environmental monitoring also extends itself into indoor applications our hobo products actually offer several options for monitoring air quality in hotels and office spaces we also have popular products for ensuring air quality and the preservation of highly valuable items in places such as libraries and museums because of covid right now we're actually seeing a large interest in monitoring co2 and classrooms and offices as a way to verify sufficient air exchange in specific rooms we've recently introduced a hobonet indoor product for more demanding applications in terms of uh distances of um communication and environment um this lends itself pretty well to monitoring air temperature and humidity for warehouse applications for sensitive items such as electronics and apparel we're also seeing these being used in food storage type applications and restaurant coolers and freezers to protect from food losses due to power or equipment failures and now finally we get to the factors to consider uh i'll cover 11 different factors to consider when you're selecting a field monitoring system uh and to start we'll look at um you know single point versus a network so the most common type of stations that are deployed or data logging stations that are deployed are single point weather stations so these stations can collect typical environmental data associated with weather stations or can be really tailored to collect the the measurements that you need you know you may want a full weather station with temperature relative humidity rainfall light wind speed and direction or you may want to really focus on temperature or any subset of that really data can be monitored remotely or uh or it could be stored on site if you are unable to get to the site and then um you know you would actually have to get out there to offload the data so um there are options requiring you to be on site to offload the data and options that with a cellular or internet connection you can get your data remotely on the other hand then you have the wireless sensor networks which basically take the weather station we just covered and added the capability of adding wireless sensors so that you could in addition to getting a general sense of the weather or environmental conditions um on a research site or a farm for example you can then study how say temperature changes from point to point within that field by adding wireless temperature nodes or wireless wind speed sensors at a different micro climate so that you can really get a feel for how those microclimates change from point to point uh these tend to be web enabled in our case they are always web enabled and use either a cellular connection or other internet connections such as wi-fi or ethernet which one is right for you well weather station wireless weather stations provide a great way to monitor environmental conditions in a field without much variation in elevation slope soil type and other factors which can cause changes in conditions such as what you see on the top image if monitoring conditions in a field with changes in topology soil types and other factors a wireless sensor network can provide more detail into these microclimates as changes in elevation and slope will create pockets of air that's for example the the cranberry growers that we work with their cranberry bugs are set at a lower elevation and uh they're actually each set at different elevations and so understanding what the temperature is at each of those points it becomes very important in in terms of frost protection in this case uh really the wireless sensor network becomes a more efficient cost effective solution because it allows you to actually see what is happening at each of those points without having to have a a specific data logger for each of those points now getting to connectivity the second factor to consider they have local local offload so for locations in which internet connectivity is not available whether it be through cellular connection lan or wi-fi standalone solutions are available so two examples of these are the hobo h21s and u30 data loggers which you basically deploy you connect five to ten sensors to these are wire sensors you can have a complete weather stations plug plugged into these and deploy them for extended periods of time they range from being battery power to giving you the option of having a solar panel to re to for longer deployments uh and then after a period of time you would have to come on site with a laptop and offload your data or take the device back to you to your office with you and and collect that data you're really viewing historical data at this point and making uh seeing what occurred in the past on the other hand uh we've got your web enabled options such as our our rx3000 and rx2100 these are connected to the uh connected to the cloud by either a cellular connection ethernet or wi-fi and these are great because they allow you to monitor conditions uh remotely and give you a near real-time perspective we don't currently offer satellite solutions but some satellite options are available and again with with these web enabled options you you not only get your data in real time but you can also have the capability of alerts and make decisions real time such as planning irrigation events or or harvest the next factor ease of deployment for ease of deployment first we'll talk about linking each sensor to the station the simplest of methods is wiring direct wiring can be as simple as plugging in a smart sensor which is then automatically identified by the logger or it may require some scaling of units basically telling the data logger what that sensor is and how to translate the information it provides with our smart sensors for example uh they're all plug and play so you basically plug them in they're ready to go um there's no needing for scaling or programming for wireless sensors uh the what i i find to be the easiest is a push button type setup uh much like pairing devices um at home with your router or any bluetooth headset that you have you basically push a button on your on the data logging station put it into search mode you push a button on the sensor and they pair each other pair themselves up and you're good to go other devices require the use of an app this isn't our case but there are other products out on the market that uh you would use at the mobile device app to set them up to the data logging station this this is also a somewhat easy method to do something that many of us are quite a process that we're quite familiar with less common are dip switches so you would select or position different dip switches to pair devices this is similar to old garage door openers for example and then other more complex devices actually require some type of programming which makes this a little more cumbersome for ease of deployment you may want to find solutions that actually use one of the first two methods in terms of mounting typically smaller equals easier to mount you want to look at whether the devices have integrated mounting provisions uh do they accommodate zip ties or screws any type of hardware to mount uh these to material that you have available you know and um on a research field or a farm you're probably looking at uh having wood posts or some type of pvc pipes available uh these make it easy to uh to mount with uh either screws or zip ties you want to look at what kind of power what kind of power these run on do you need batteries how often would batteries be need to be replaced or is there a solar power option such as what the hobo devices uh for outdoor applications they they tend to all have solar panels built into them so that uh the batteries recharge during the day you can get extended deployment periods um from there on out um and a security concern are they easy to hide one of the biggest challenges a lot of our customers have is that their devices are actually stolen or vandalized typically when they're deployed in public spaces not so much of an issue when they're on private property next looking at software how easy is it to or how easy and intuitive is it to configure and learn uh what the how the software operates is it easy for you to use what kind of information does it display does it display the most uh relevant information to you can you configure this to make it suitable to your use can you share the data with others we do have quite a we find quite a few customers that like to share uh data whether it be with colleagues um other the farmers customers even they'll share uh environmental data from their farm for example with with customers they may want to you may be interested in automatic automated sending of data to either an email or an ftp site and then web services you may have some other type of software you're running and you where you just want to integrate data from from our devices and for anyone with large areas to cover or obstructions to a wireless signal wireless coverage and its adequacy for your application and location is a major factor of concern so you'll want to alert look at what type of frequency or what type of wireless connectivity is being used you want to know what the range is how many nodes can be included at a network the number of nodes will will determine you know how many points you can measure off of a single uh system uh how many hops are hops are enabled or are you able to get uh we'll cover that a little more in detail and then in the next slide in terms of the wireless frequency there are there are different frequencies that you can go with some that give you a longer range while others give you a higher resiliency in getting through walls or foliage we use a 900 megahertz signal which is the line of sight range is a little lower but it can actually get through walls and foliage which the funny thing about farms and forests is that there tends to be four foliage sodium associated with those um so so we found that to be a more robust signal uh typically point of comparison is uh the line of sight for a wireless range uh it just gives you a a point of comparison from the device to device typically uh you'll be able to find what mounting height that is set at i think we typically provide you a uh that information for six and ten feet mounting heights then um in terms of covering uh a y field with uh several uh measurement points you'll want to understand what type of uh network you can create um so the most simple form is the star network and basically in the start star network all the sensors must communicate back to the central station which then sends the data to the internet this limits the range of that of your sensors in terms of distance to a radius around that central station depending on the maximum communication distance between each sensor and that station on the other hand with mesh networks uh similar to what hobonet uses uh with these mesh networks sensors can communicate through each other so they relay the message from one another to that central station the advantage here is that because you can relay that information from one sensor to the other you can extend your network of sensors out much farther from that central station this increases the coverage of a single uh single central station and this is where then we get into the number of hops that i mentioned uh in the previous slide for example for hobo you can do five hops before you get to the central station so meaning you can go you can have five devices extending away from each other away from the central station given that we have a maximum distance of 1500 to 2000 feet from from device to device you can go 1500 feet from the station to the first sensor another 1500 uh to the next sensor and so on and so forth and you can do that up to five times in effect getting up to between 7 500 to 10 000 feet radially away from that central station this translates to roughly eight to ten square miles of sensors operating off a single hobonet station and a single data plan and when when you're looking at cost this is where we we provide you a great deal of value in terms of actionable information you know you want to understand does the software provide you any information uh that allows you to take action can you view you know uh can you actually look at any other information outside of just what is being measured such as battery health or connect the health of the wireless connection so that you can take action before you may lose valuable data in research do your dashboards show critical information on environmental conditions so if you're typically on the go you need to make perhaps you want to have dashboards that allow you to quickly view what's going on so you can make decisions on the go then does a sensor network integrate with third-party services or any other services such as crop management networks or software perhaps you want to integrate with irrigation monitoring and control systems you already have hobonet for instance integrates with newa the network for environment and weather applications and similarly fun the florida automated weather network uh which provided great tools uh for irrigation crop and pest modeling um they basically take data from your from your specific location and provide you the indica give you an indication of the risk of the occurrence of any pests or or irrigation needs so that you can take action while also caring for the environment we've also recently added aquarius aquatics by aquatics informatics for anyone doing water projects this is a pretty popular water data management software a big feature for a lot of these remote monitoring systems is the ability to get alarm notifications again here in the northeast one of the uh big drivers of needs for our products is monitoring critical temperatures especially early spring and late fall for frost conditions for different types of berries blueberries strawberries and cranberries being the the big one so you want to understand what kind of alarms the equipment triggers um can you set your own thresholds remotely um can you have different levels of notifications um and then one one point uh to really focus on is whether these alarms are in station or they're web based uh the difference here is for in-station alarms in station alarms they provide a more immediate response meaning the sensor takes a reading and it notices notices that the temperature is too low for example and it immediately triggers a call to you or a text message to be sent out for example or web-based alarms you have to wait for that measurement to get taken and then depending on the call how frequently a call is made from the device to the web service that will then dictate how quickly you get your alarm so if you have this data getting uploaded every hour then that call can take up to an hour that alert can take up to an hour if you have these this data getting transferred every six hours and you know uh it can take even longer than that um so i we tend to we find it uh for critical situations that these institutional alarms may be uh preferable and i when you get an alarm you need to turn something on or off if so look for a system that has uh different relay output options um this uh for example you know in many situations for cranberry farmers when they get an alert indicating that a temperature is too low indicative of uh frost risk uh this alert can also trigger a relay to initiate the irrigation pumps that then start spraying water on on the cranberries uh thus protecting them from from frost maintenance of historical data so uh this really comes in two two points here one uh you can use this historical data or access this historical data to make improvements year to year to your operations but it also uh serves a way to protect against future claims whether it be you know using environmental data to prove that you know when conditions were appropriate when you sprayed to protect against claim that your your pesticides you may have damaged someone else's property you can also use rain wind and temperature data to support insurance claims for crop losses so say there was a large rain event these systems will actually record that data and store it so that you can you can use that when you're filing your claim scalability so assuming you expect this to be a permanent long-term deployment you'll want to understand the possibility of you actually scaling this up and adding sensors to the network if there is uh this is likely that you'll want to add more sensors and capabilities to your operation as you grow as you learn how to uh really use these devices you'll want to select that sensor network which easily allows you to expand it in the future part of this is also understanding the maximum number of sensors and their maximum range along with the types of sensors that are available a common request that we get for the ability to not necessarily add new sensors but also integrate existing equipment uh for remote monitoring an example of this is monitoring pumps to confirm that they are running uh check water pressure and water lines um so basically taking sensors that may already be there and just i build them into into our network actually uh still on scalability um you want to consider different types of sensors that you can combine just before this webinar attendee asked about um you know being able to do a hydrology type study and i believe the need is to monitor different things such as water level rainfall soil moisture for example so this is this is something that manufacturers such as onsite can do because we have such a wide array of measurements that we provide our sensor networks are built so that they're capable of incorporating all of these so for example our our rx 3000 station gives you the ability to combine a water level measurement with wired or wireless options for rainfall you can also incorporate different types of soil moisture sensors from volumetric water content to soil water potential we have uh single point devices and multi-depth uh soil moisture sensors and then a water level module so that you can really do this whole study off of one device and get all this data remotely on our cloud service then uh total cost of ownership uh cost to consider you'll want to look at the initial costs annual fees uh understand if there are any annual costs or recurring costs so um uh one typical example of this is uh you know uh data cost so for example with onset you would purchase the hardware that hardware is yours there is no recurring fee for the hardware the only recurring fees are data so the more data you use uh the higher the plan you would have to get so the data the amount of data you need is is tied to how many sensors you have in total and how often you're taking a measurement and then uploading that data to the web while other manufacturers do have recurring fees on the actual devices themselves so you may pay a fee up front for the sensor and the station but then there is a recurring fee for that on top of the service that you are you're using and then of course there is a value the product provides on the other hand so you'll want to consider the impact or the positive impact that these devices will have on your profit when when making the decision so uh earlier in the webinar i talked i mentioned the newest study showing that on average uh farmer saved just over two thousand dollars per acre uh the station that uh those customers uploading data to new uh are used using the base station costs under nineteen hundred dollars so you're talking about uh uh after being paid off after a year and then it all being a profit after that and then there's time savings um that you know being able to do more with uh and less time and a big thing is determine if local grants or subsidies are available this may be general uh for um for growers uh they may be specific to certain industries or crops so it's always important to to check with your local organizations to see if there are any grants available and then time horizon so how long do you expect this product to provide value to your activities and decisions uh just to give you a quick example of our quick frame work of uh how much of these products cost so a web enable station our lowest cost web enabled station it's our micro rx which starts at 560. 620 for the version with a solar panel built in so you're just looking to monitor temperature to protect from frost you're looking at 95 adder your data plan if you need um you know cellular connectivity is 150 per year so for your first year you're looking at 865 dollars for that solar option and that gives you a year worth of data um a more complex example just to give you an idea of how how that that can grow so here we have an example of uh someone doing frost protection monitoring uh annika at some cranberry bugs and uh they're using our rx 3000 station because they want higher capability so not only do they want to monitor temperature but they also want to control um the irrigation system with that so um in addition to the wireless sensor so they're basically uh they they have the station uh set up near the pump house and then they have a wire they have the temperature uh sensor actually in the cranberry bog so that they're getting that that real on location temperature measurement and not having to estimate how you know how many degrees off uh the temperature would be at the actual bug in addition to that they're using a relay module to wire a pump to and then they have a a pulse input sensor that will tie into the water meter and so this will allow them to collect get that temperature measurement uh get an alert whenever the temperature goes below a certain point they can this can activate the relay which starts the pump and they can get confirmation that the that water is running all this for um under two thousand dollars finally uh who owns your data um is the data collected for you your use only or is it used uh for a third party i bring this up because there are some models out there a lot of these new startups that they actually provide devices at a much lower cost but then they take your data and they they share your data they sell your data and they monetize that data and that's how they basically pay for the devices that they sell you at a much lower cost this may be okay in many cases it may you may not be okay or may want to keep keep the this data these data uh specific to you um so just something to be aware of or a quick question to ask for the record uh we do not share data uh onset for onset customers data is your theirs and theirs only and with that i will be open to questions and we're just about 10 minutes over time so jessica uh do we have any questions i'll have my great colleague jessica hop on right now hi richard thanks yes um we did have a couple great questions um the first talks about the rx 2100 uh stations so just wondering um what station option will be best to monitor water level so if you're looking for water level uh only and a few perhaps a handful of wire devices the rx 2100 is your lowest cost option and will do everything you need to do if you on the other hand need you know we just have had a customer a couple days ago looking to have two water level uh loggers on one station or um combine water level monitoring with wireless sensors then you would have to upgrade to the rx 3000 but the rx 2100 for water level uh would be a great solution okay and that's that is always something that our uh that our water expert andrew can um can can help you with make sure that you get the the right solution set up fantastic thank you so if they wanted to do water level but have the remote monitoring um what would you suggest in that case so water level with remote monitoring uh the rx 2100 is the um the i forget exactly what the option is but the rx 2100 family is the the lowest cost solution if you're combining uh water level with a wireless sensors so you want to be able to get uh other data at a specific at other points then you would need the rx 3000 great thank you um we had another question on um the wireless the rx 2100 and 3000 for remote monitoring how many wireless sensors can you connect to these stations and also how far apart can they be set so in terms of maximum number of sensors it depends on the sensors you're combining so um the rough number is 50 wireless sensors and up to five wired on the erx 2100 up to 10 wired on the rx 3000 for most sensors uh that uh only take up uh two or three data channels you can get up to 50 wireless sensors however we've recently launched the multi-depth soil moisture sensors and that measure soil moisture and temperature at various steps these um consume many more data channels and so we also have a specification of 336 data channels max so you if that equates to i think the longest probe i think you can connect up to 18 of these devices so it really depends on on the sensors in most cases you can use the estimate of 50 uh tops great thanks richard um there is another question here from eric and i believe what he's getting at is the durability of the um of the stations and whether they can be deployed in areas that are prone to flooding yes so these these devices are um they are designed to be exposed to uh bad conditions um they they are designed for i mean they're deployed uh for and very hard hot and humid to very cold um you know locations uh they're subject to ocean spray uh all the time uh they are they're not designed for submersion so if the concern is that they'll be under water for an extended period of time i don't believe that is um that the ip rating meets that that requirement um but in terms of being exposed to rain and water splashing they'll be okay great thanks richard um okay i think uh we're at a good time now so i think if if anybody else had any questions we can certainly follow up with them afterwards and i just want to remind everyone that we do have a survey at the end if they have any questions if they could please tick yes to being contacted by a sales application specialist great thank you jessica and thank you everyone i do have contact info for a lot of our uh global sales folks there um you know or just reply feel free to reply to any email you get from jessica um in the next couple days and uh she'll i'll be sure to get those emails from from her and uh reply with any any additional questions you may have so thank you all and have a great day