FARM JENNY FIELD RECEIVER
Farm Jenny provides farmers and horse owners with freedom and peace of mind -- monitoring animal behavior 24/7 anywhere on the farm.
The Field Receiver uses Thread to extend full-farm connectivity to every animal; whether in the barn or out to pasture. This rugged, self-contained Thread router is designed for DIY install and continuous outdoor operation in any climate.
THE CHALLENGE
Most horses and other livestock are raised on small farms. To deploy its continuous monitoring and machine learning system, Farm Jenny needed a low-power networking solution that was robust, scalable to cover hundreds of acres, but easy enough for DIY installation. Also, animal sensors couldn’t require charging so low power was critical.
Cellular couldn’t reach into the corners of the barns or down into the valleys. Wi-Fi was too power-hungry and difficult to provision. Thread forms a robust, power-efficient mesh network extending IP-based connectivity to every corner of the farm from a shared gateway.
THE PROCESS
Farm Jenny knew that a customer-installed IoT system at farm scale was no small feat. It needed an engaged supplier that could offer concurrent smartphone connectivity for a seamless in-app deployment experience. The Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 chipset and OpenThread stack fit the bill.
Thread-enabled Field Receivers need to offer a secure and efficient way to get data from lots of animals to the Gateway. Farm Jenny implemented a secure and efficient application layer using CoAP. With this approach, every animal and farm sensor has direct IP connectivity to the cloud.
THE SOLUTION
Farm Jenny for Horses is the first product deployed on this innovative farm IoT platform. This solution provides continuous location and behavior tracking through a real-time dashboard, trend reporting, and push alerts via an iOS and Android app and service subscription.
This system is entering a new market which is hungry for connected solutions. Farm Jenny plans to release solutions for additional animal types and a suite of interoperable Thread-based farm sensors and actuators (including 3rd party).
The Field Receiver is also available as a standalone item (including a white-label option) for any OEM needing a robust outdoor Thread router.
