Soracom announced recently that BinSentry, an agriculture technology company, is harnessing Soracom’s IoT building blocks and connectivity to enable its machine learning-enabled sensors to support intelligent, automated feed management solutions for feed mill operators, ag industry vertical integrators, and livestock farms.
Accurate inventory management and supply chain efficiency historically have been challenging for suppliers, sellers, and buyers of livestock feed because monitoring the amount of feed inside a bin or a silo requires frequent time-consuming and potentially unsafe manual checks. Often, workers at feed mills, vertical processing plants, or livestock barns climb tall ladders multiple times each day and bend over the side of a silo to look deeply into it to assess the amount of feed remaining inside.
“We have up to 76,000 points we’re measuring inside of a silo, and about 9,600 inside a feed bin, and we measure every single one of them about 50 times every five seconds,” said Nathan Hoel, Co-Founder and CTO of BinSentry. “We now monitor 40,000 devices and send as much raw data back to the Cloud as we can from our sensors to then apply AI to that raw data – about half a million total measurements – just to get an accurate assessment of the volume inside of a single bin.”
These requirements led BinSentry to Soracom and the company’s complete package of reliable cellular IoT connectivity, flexible SIM usage and billing, and MVNO agreements covering more than 180 countries and territories across more than 360 carriers.
To make it work, BinSentry needed reliable IoT connectivity to its on-site sensors spread widely across mostly-rural areas in North American markets. The company experimented with a number of connectivity technologies, including LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, before choosing LTE Cat-M1 because it ran off the same widespread, existing network as LTE phones.
BinSentry provides time-of-flight sensors that can be placed inside large feed bins, and that use infrared light pulses to measure feed levels. The image and distance data that is collected is transmitted back to the Cloud to allow the creation of 3D images of feed bin inventories. It is an intelligent, automated remote monitoring solution that quickly and safely provides feed mills and others with extremely accurate inventory data.
“What we discovered was that having access to as many different carriers as possible in rural areas was extremely important, and so we needed an MVNO with as many carrier agreements as possible who would allow us to easily switch SIMs from one carrier to another when we need to,” said Hoel.
“BinSentry’s experience is evidence of how reliable cellular IoT connectivity can power new business models in the agriculture industry, and other verticals as well,” said Kenta Yasukawa, Ph.D., CTO and Co-Founder of Soracom. “Being bearer, Cloud and hardware-agnostic allows us freedom to partner directly with our customers to provide the right building blocks to enable and scale their IoT deployments.”
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