Crossbow Technology : Eko : eKo

Applications

Crop Monitoring

Environmental Monitoring

Case Study

Sensor Integration

“ēKoView is so intuitive that I didn’t need a user manual," remarked the head of the company’s engineering department. “The plug-and-play sensors make deployment very simple. Deploying at other sites will be easy."

Challenge in Achieving Consistent Quality
Crop Monitoring Profile:
Tree Nursery Monitoring Background A multi-billion dollar forest products company has four tree nurseries in the western United States, ranging from 100 to 400 acres. They also have four similar sites on the East Coast, plus several greenhouses for seed germination. Unique among companies in the industry, the company’s largest western nursery grows seedling trees for reforestation and resale to other nurseries. Its total volume of product generates rigorous, extensive monitoring needs.

Monitoring Needs and Challenges
Without effective monitoring, frost can be devastating. To protect their product, the company needs to monitor for frost in the fall and spring at many locations in the nursery. When frost is detected, water must be sprayed to prevent the seedling temperature from dropping. Ambient temperature and humidity must also be monitored during the growing season and in the fall. In the winter months, the soil has to be monitored for freezing temperatures.

Chill hours have to be measured as well. These are the number of hours during the growing season that are less than 42° F. Chill hours are critical to harvesting and shipping of seedlings, evident in the fact that each bag of seedlings has the chill hours printed on a label. This tells customers how long they have before the tree will come out of dormancy – effectively, how much time they have to replant.

ēKo Solution
The company adopted Crossbow's ēKo solution after exploring various options. A previous wireless solution worked adequately but had a price of more than $1000 per point. Also, it required time to build an environmental enclosure with solar cell as well as programming knowledge. Any small changes, such as adding users to an alert list, required software modification which must be performed by the vendor.

In adopting the ēKo solution, the company deployed 12 nodes over a large area to monitor different microclimates. The wide coverage of each node allows them to place one node for every 25 acres. The alerts for frost detection and other sensor readings enable the company to monitor ambient temperature and humidity, while also performing some monitoring of soil moisture. The low-cost of each monitoring point provides a more cost-effective alternative to the previous solution.

Easy to Deploy and Use
More than the monitoring capabilities and the cost savings, ease of use has been a major benefit of the ēKo solution. Web-based access to the data, for example, allows the technical staff to remotely monitor and maintain the system as well as share information among them. Also, the built-in ēKoView application with the flexibility to configure key parameters and view trend charts made it easy to start monitoring immediately.

Leading the revolution to connect the physical world with the digital world through wireless sensor networks, the Crossbow Solutions blog highlights innovative and exciting ways customers are using this technology.

Subscribe to RSS Feed | Visit Crossbow Blog

Corporate Headquarters:
PH: 408.965.3300 | E: info@xbow.com

Contact Crossbow | Find A Distributor