By: Fred de Haro, Pycom CEO
I was the first person I know to say we should be flying Drones with LoRa. Everyone around me told me I was crazy at the time and that it couldn’t be done….If only I had a penny every time I had heard that…
Pycom made that principle a reality in the 2016 Thingmonk event where we ‘stole the show’ flying drones to catch Pokemons LoRa using very early prototypes of the LoPy.
Today, the world of LPWAN and LoRa has evolved and I am so pleased to see more companies innovating and adopting the network for their IoT applications.
This brings me to a story of ‘Cows and Drones’. Our customer and partner Hemav have done the development to enable a very innovative system that monitors cattle and Agriculture. They specialize in digital solutions for many industries using cloud-based data processing and drone technology.
The reason we know of this Barcelona and Madrid based company is because one of their very clever solutions is using the LoPy for an intelligent (digital) livestock management solution whereby they help farmers collect remote data amongst livestock.
They use an ear tag on the animal and drone each connected with a LoPy acting as a nano gateway. The drone then flies out and collects data which is returned to the cloud based platform to enable productivity and optimisation for farmers particularly where they are covering large areas of land.
The solution allows cowboys and breeders to consult the state of the animals and prioritize attention based on veterinary grounds from their mobile phone, tablet or computer. This will make it possible, for example, to detect in advance the moment in which the animals will give birth to their calves with a view to reducing mortality at calving.
This in summary this helps
– Decrease in livestock-mortality rate
– Improvement and optimisation of livestock management in extensive grazing
– Improvement and optimisation of pasture management
Check out an overview of the IXOriguè Cow Project solution here.
We’re bringing our very own Pycom cow to the Mobile World Congress Americas show along with the Hemav kit to showcase this solution at MWCA17 in San Francisco in a couple of weeks starting 12th September 2017.
Hemav have lots of other cool applications like geomapping, asset management, and they can even give you a drone certification. They have a load of great videos on their Youtube channel…I was particularly interested in the Vineyard Monitoring Solution (warning this clip is in Spanish) and hope to work with them on tasting the results J.
See you all in San Francisco. North Hall, stand N.324.