Sol Chip, a provider of Internet of Things (IoT) systems and energy harvesting solutions, has recently announced its new Sol Chip Comm (SCC) autonomous, wireless, solar tag for enabling precision agriculture and smart irrigation.
The device is a compact, maintenance-free, solar-powered, wireless tag that powers, controls and wirelessly connects a wide variety of sensors to the cloud. In precision agriculture and smart irrigation applications, SCC feeds real-time data readings from up to hundreds of agriculture-related sensors, including those that monitor soil moisture, soil temperature, ambient temperature, air temperature, nutrients levels and more, into a precision agriculture application server. This essential data is analyzed by a precision agriculture application in order to make data-driven adjustments for optimizing water and fertilization consumption and improving crop yields.
“Precision agriculture is definitely the future of agriculture,” said Avi Schweitzer, CTO, Netafim, a smart drip and micro-irrigation solutions provider. “Sol Chip has the right approach that will turn the promises of precision agriculture and smart irrigation into reality.”
SCC is solar-powered and designed to operate continuously for more than 10 years with no maintenance requirements, removing the need to constantly replace and discard batteries. As a wireless device, it eliminates costs and time associated with deploying and maintaining wires to connect the deployed sensors. In addition, the low cost of SCC makes the deployment of wireless sensors for agriculture purposes to be financially accessible.
“With our LightBattery technology, Sol Chip is uniquely positioned to realize our vision of enabling billions of autonomous IoT devices for many different market sectors in a way that is cost effective and environmentally sustainable,” said Dr. Shani Keysar, founder and CEO, Sol Chip. “Our new SCC device clearly demonstrates these qualities for precision agriculture and smart irrigation and we are working on more applications for additional market sectors.”
Sol Chip is currently offering an evaluation kit for precision agriculture and smart irrigation, which includes two SCC solar tags, two sensors, a wireless gateway, all the necessary accessories, access to third party Web servers and support. The components of the evaluation kit are pre-integrated, enabling the evaluation kit to be rapidly deployed for testing in an open field or greenhouse.
Edited by
Alicia Young