I am looking for commercial supply of agricultural electric fence monitor devices. Routine reports when fence is on, alert when fence is off, capability to turn monitor off when not needed.
I am aware of LoFence on github and this looks ideal but I need to buy rather than build.
If anyone can build or supply then, depending on cost, I can order a number right away.
Have you contacted the owner of the github repo? They seem to have at the very least put quite a bit of thought into the problem. No idea if they would be interested in doing so, but they might be able to arrange to find a small scale vendor to crank out a number of their design if they had a buyer lined up.
One of the things to keep in mind is that closed firmware on IoT gadgets can end up being a huge source of issues and frustration - although LoFence project may seem “unfinished” compared to something you can just order off an e-commerce site, so many of those gadgets come with huge buyer’s remorse when it becomes evident that the developers did not understand, or really care about, your application to the degree that you do, and leave you stuck suffering from entirely fixable problems on any of the sensing, radio communication, or power/battery fronts. Getting hardware that hosts software which can be improved not only by the original developers but also by the end user (or a consulting resource of their choice) based on lessons learned until it is right up against the limits of the technology may be worth a little extra time and money up front.
Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t pursue two paths - if there’s something ready to go, buying those would be a way to gain a quick sense of where the real challenges of the application are. And the possible need to setup gateway coverage would be the same for any LoRaWAN solution.
And then sometimes you can find a cheap gadget on an e-commerce site, recognize that it has a halfway decent hardware design with a known and reprogrammable MCU at the center, and be able to get both the ready availability at a low price in the near term and the longer range option of replacing the factory firmware with something more optimal.
We have bought a couple of these and starting to integrate into our LoRa network.
They solve half the equation for you
How many of these will the typical farmer buy?
Thanks to everyone for useful responses.
Electric fence monitors are - obviously - mostly of interest to farmers with livestock on closely-managed field-based pasture and grazing; mostly cattle and sheep. In Scotland the number of farms is several thousand and most farmers have 2 or 3 electric fence units, usually with a small solar panel and a 12V battery. Various types of hand-held test units are common, check on Amazon, they start at about 10 ÂŁ/$/E.
Hopefully a product will come along as I’m stuck with a buy-not-build requirement.
www.agriace.com
An Aussie company has been working specifically on this exact issue for some time. We’ve used a number of their prototypes and been extremely happy with the product and service. As we have used them, they came ready to run on our existing LoRaWAN network and all the monitoring and notifications operate behind the scenes by AgriAce. I can’t comment on their final product manufacture but may be worth contacting them to see how far off they are.
http://www.ictinternational.com/ EF-NODE: Electric Fence Node
ICT have also recently come out with a contactless LoRA electric fence monitor. Although we haven’t tried these we have used a range of their quality LoRa products. As opposed to AgriAce typically we’ve purchased just the sensors from ICT and run everything else ourselves so not across their back end services.
Hi, we manufacture the PTE0705 fence monitor as well as our IP monitors in bulk should you require.
We can brand them with your company detail’s depending on the quantity you require and ship across the world.
www.jva-fence.com.au
Regards,
Grant