Smart Industry No.1 2022

Smart Lifestyle IoT and Fighting Forest Fires
the LoRaWAN and the 4G radios
in the Border Gateways must be
on all the time because they must
be ready to accept data from the
Wildfire nodes or inbound messages
from the cloud. If 4G LTE-M
connectivity is unavailable, falling
back to 2G protocols also boosts
power consumption.
“A key challenge for us is the ultralow
power design of the sensor
Whispering Forests
The Silvanet Border
Gateway brokers
communication
between the mesh of
LoRa networks and
the internet.
hardware,” says Brinkschulte. “We
need to work in an environment
where we have very little energy
input, yet we have to do something
complex. We need to scan for gas
compositions and run ML software,
it needs to work reliably, and we
need to detect fires very quickly.
These are contradicting goals, and
so one challenge is to select the
right ultra-low power components.
“At the same time, price is key
because we will need to put hundreds
of thousands if not millions
of Wildfire Sensors in a forest for
the system to work, and the price
of each component at that scale
determines the system cost. We
can’t choose a component that
performs extremely well but
pushes the Bill of Material up by
five euro and kills the product.”
source ©: Dryad Networks
Partnering for
Market Insights
Dryad has worked with Avnet
Silica to explore its options for
components that can meet these
tough challenges.
For example, the initial design
uses a single- and dual-core microcontroller
which offers ultra-low
power operation and integrates
LoRa radio, while having the performance
to analyse sensor data
with enough sophistication to detect
wildfires early, without creating
false positives.
“We have to do that in the sensor
because we do not have enough
bandwidth to transmit all of the
sensor data to the analytics in the
cloud,” according to Brinkschulte.
“We really appreciate the competent
discussions we're having
with Avnet Silica. They are bringing
a lot of ideas and proposals for
components which may optimise
the performance of the system.”
Dryad is already looking at potential
optimisations of the hardware
designs with even lower power
and even lower costs, “and that's
a constant discussion that we're
having on which chipsets to use.
We need to have it at really low
cost and ultra-low power because
if you halve the power consumption
of the device you can halve
the size of the solar panel and
energy storage, which are key
price-driving factors of the sensor
node”, Brinkschulte notes.
Dryad is using super-capacitors to
store energy from the solar cells,
rather than introducing potentially
toxic and flammable rechargeable
batteries into the forest.
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