2014 Annual Report for FNC14-960
Open Source Solutions for Vineyard Health Management
Summary
Open Source Solutions for vineyard health management, is an idea that vineyard managers should be able to quickly assess the health of their own vineyards, and react to changing environments, without using a system and tools that are controlled and maintained by a third party thus adding unnecessary costs to vineyard management.
They are tools that can be made or assembled by individuals and quickly deployed and relay information back to the manager. The software that is used to collect and visualize this information should be easily configured and changeable to suit individual vineyard needs.
The tools that can be used range from simple wireless sensors for temperature, humidity, leaf wetness, soil moisture, soil temperature, rain, soil conductivity, and solar radiation. Cell Phones with GPS apps and use of the full spectrum camera to take near infrared photos. The use of aerial photography in the visible and near-infrared spectrum to map vineyards and monitor disease and pest outbreaks to tell how well the plants are aspirating.
The Objectives of this project were to find inexpensive solutions to some of the smart Agriculture advancements that are out there such as environmental monitoring and satellite imaging for crop monitoring
Find and implement easy open source software to interface with the hardware to allow vineyard managers to make smart decisions on how to manage their crops and to react quickly to changing situations in their vineyards
Milestone 1. Identify a flying platform and cameras for aerial photography field mapping and Near infrared spectrum photography
I selected an Iris Quadcopetr from http://store.3drobotics.com/products/iris. One of the accessories for this unit is a camera gimble that mounts to a Gopro camera from http://shop.gopro.com/hero4/hero4-silver/CHDHY-401.html. The stock lense that comes with the camera needs to be swapped out with a non fisheye lens, and the IR filter needs to be replaced with one from Public labs to be able to take photos in the infrared spectrum. http://provideocoalition.com/jfoster/story/gopro-replacement-lenses-for-hero3-is the websight for the replacement lense. http://publiclab.org/ is the site to get the filter replacement.
This combination along with Adrupilot for android found in the google play store makes an excellent platform for aerial photography and vineyard sencing. It provides for flight planning and GPS location of photos to interface with a GIS software such as GRASS GIS which is an open source mapping software. http://mapknitter.org/ and http://ecosynth.org/ are great resources to help with mapping and http://infragram.org/ is a great resource for reading and assessing infrared photos
As For the wireless environmental sensors, I was looking for the base sensor hardware to cost less than 10 dollars for each node and then adding the cost of the sensor electronics to this for sensors that can monitor temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and solar radiation for less than 18 dollars. These are the inexpensive sensors.
Soil conductivity, leaf wetness, rainfall, wind speed, and wind direction are the more expensive sensors and are only to be in 1 or 2 locations. These sets of sensors I’m trying to keep under 30 dollars a set.
These sensors have been built and tested on a single sensor basis and this coming year I’ll focus on getting them to talk to the base station and making sense of the data and keeping power requirements low, to make a true low power, low-cost wireless sensor node system.
Visible light spectrometer measurements of soil samples and vegetation didn’t really work the way I expected it to to and this needs more research into how it should work. But infrared imaging of soil and vegetation are promising tests to do.
Some of the difficulties with the past season were: late bud break and vine damage caused by the harsh winter, learning of the software needed to process the photos, and getting the sensors to talk to each other and the base station. These difficulties will be remedied in the coming season.
The last difficulty that was encountered was myself getting employment outside the US and deploying to that employment in early August cutting the season short for myself.