Agritech Soil Monitoring Node
A solar-powered, multi-depth soil moisture and temperature sensor node for large-scale precision irrigation.
The client wanted to deploy thousands of soil sensor nodes across large agricultural plots to drive precision irrigation decisions, but needed hardware that could survive full outdoor exposure for multiple growing seasons without battery replacement, at a per-unit cost low enough to justify dense deployment.
We designed a solar-harvesting sensor node with a small photovoltaic panel, supercapacitor buffer and aggressive low-power firmware design, built around an ESP32 for LoRaWAN connectivity and multi-depth capacitive soil moisture sensing. Enclosure design and conformal coating were specified for full outdoor exposure and ingress protection.
We optimized the BOM cost aggressively, evaluating component alternatives at every stage to hit the client's target unit cost for dense-deployment economics without compromising the multi-year outdoor reliability requirement.
The final design achieved a target unit cost enabling dense per-plot deployment, with solar-harvesting eliminating battery replacement entirely for units in typical sun exposure. The client moved from single-digit pilot deployments to a multi-thousand-unit commercial rollout.
“They treated our unit cost target as a real engineering constraint, not a wish list item. That discipline is the reason we could scale from a ten-unit pilot to a three-thousand-unit rollout.”
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