Grape Networks, a company specializing in the wireless sensor monitoring of vineyard microclimates and sensor canopy management on the Internet, announced that the company has established sales offices in Germany and France, reports Wireless Sensor Networks Blog.
Since Grape Networks’ inception four years ago, the company has been dominating the vineyard marketplace for the wireless sensor monitoring of microclimates on the Internet in the U.S., but the U.S. only represents 5% of the 20 million world wide vineyard acres. Furthermore, according to Peter Tsepeleff, president of Grape Networks, “…the company has had a tremendous response in vineyards in the U.S., and now that we have a proven system, it is time to expand into the huge international arena.”
Grape Networks monitors vineyards with miniature wireless sensors embedded directly next to the grape berry. The sensors operate on just two double AA batteries, and transmit data in a wireless mesh to a gateway, where the data is sent to the Internet for reception anywhere in the world. Along with temperature, humidity and solar radiation, alerts for frost and powdery mildew are sent to any Internet enabled PC or mobile phone.
According to WiFi Planet, the network, branded Climate Genie, can include thousands of individual nodes (or motes) that are 10-300 meters apart and cover as much as 100 acres per network.
Individual nodes are programmed to detect humidity, temperature, soil moisture, light, metals and chemicals, among other things. They transmit data back to a gateway that is hooked up to a directional Wi-Fi antenna that broadcasts approximately five miles away to a tower.
The cost varies by terrain. A vineyard in a hilly region, such as Napa, California, may require more motes than one in a flat location, but the base price is $150/acre with a minimum of 100 acres (or $15,000) per vineyard. After the first year, partners are charged a subscription fee of $75/acre to maintain the network.
Sprint sells a variety of M2M devices. Aeris.net is a leading Machine-to-Machine (M2M) provider and supplies management information systems for farmers, orchardists and others. Aeris uses cellular control channels, normally used for text messaging and to set up voice calls before they’re connected. Aeris has some 750,000 devices connected to its San Jose, Calif.-based network-operations center.
Acclima located at Meridian, Idaho manufactures irrigation control systems governed by soil moisture sensors.
Automata manufactures complete system solutions including telemetry, software and sensors used in a variety of industrial and agricultural applications.
SCADA, an acronym for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition refers to a large-scale, distributed measurement and control system. The bulk of the site control is actually performed automatically by a Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) or by a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). Host control functions are generally restricted to basic site over-ride or supervisory level capability.
ZigBee is used by sensor mesh networks that require a long battery life at low data rates. ZigBee uses 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz unlicensed bands.
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