I'm interested in these offline systems in the agtech space. What kinds of use cases exist here? I'd love to be involved in agtech if I thought it could have a positive impact on soil health.
Can't speak much to the soil health side of things - though I know there's quite a few companies doing that.
I was mainly involved in the logistics side of things - moving & tracing livestock, fruit. Long and the short of it most people, solutions and systems just assume always-on internet, which as you can imagine in remote regions is not a reality (even if it's a reality within range of the farmhouse router with starlink, the front gate could be miles away).
Interesting. Having some friends who write software/hardware for factories, always-on connectivity is definitely not an assumption. I had assumed it would be the same for AgTech but sounds like I'm wrong. What are some of the biggest pain points you've encountered?
Not the poster you’re replying to but I’m also in AgTech. We were at a demo a couple of years ago at a farm. Not a competitor but sort of was doing a demo half a mile north of us. We’d designed for “no connectivity” from day one, including power. Our control station ran on a generator but also had a backup battery to keep the radios alive if the genny dies.
Half way through their demo, there was a power outage at the farm (as happens from time to time). As it turns out, their [insert product] relied on a connection to either AWS or Azure for some key functionality. Power goes out, turns out they had been using the farm internet for that connectivity (LTE service was miserable in the region), so their huge machine just stops and sits there idling in the field. Can’t even command it to return back to the crowd. Meanwhile our drone is still running back and forth on our field area and we didn’t even notice that anything went wrong.
I was mainly involved in the logistics side of things - moving & tracing livestock, fruit. Long and the short of it most people, solutions and systems just assume always-on internet, which as you can imagine in remote regions is not a reality (even if it's a reality within range of the farmhouse router with starlink, the front gate could be miles away).