Agriculture
What changes when a connected product has to work in agriculture
Indeema builds the software side of connected agricultural products for the companies that make them: the web portal, the mobile apps and the accounts, sites and settings a customer lives with, while the maker keeps its sensor and firmware. Behind it is a team of 230+ engineers with 16+ years of connected-product work; the sensor maker’s case below shows how that split worked.
A connected product on a farm is installed on someone else’s land, set up by people who are not engineers, and left alone for long stretches. Indeema engineers the software side of agricultural products around those facts: the accounts, sites and settings a customer lives with, and the hand-off to the team that builds the device.
Agriculture software development services for connected products, from the companies that build them. This is not a page about farm software for farm operators.
The setting
Why is a farm a different place for a connected product?
A connected product on a farm is mounted, set up and left behind by people who do not work for its maker.
A unit is installed where it will live, not on a bench.
- BUILDING
In a building
Barns and sheds. A unit is mounted high on a beam or wall and reached rarely. What it can tell the software, and what the software does when it tells nothing, is the engineering question.
- OUTDOORS
Out in the open
Weather, distance and no one nearby. The product has to stay useful when no one visits, and has to say so when it cannot.
- MOVED
Moved between sites
A unit lifted from one building or field and installed in another keeps its history only if the software was built to follow it.
Five things change
The installed site
A connected product on a farm belongs to an account, at a site, in a building or field, down to one installed unit. Five things change along the way.
The software side
The maker’s device
- ACCOUNTthe business that buys the product
- SITEa farm; one business may have several
- BUILDING OR FIELDwhere a unit lives
A season off. Every level above can sit idle for months.
SITE
Who owns whatA customer is not one user. A business owns several sites, a site has buildings or fields, and staff, advisers and installers come and go.
- What engineering settles
- The tree from account to unit, who sees what at each level, and what a site’s history does when its people change. Accounts are held apart from unit data and settings.
- Stays with the maker or the farm
- Which roles exist on a real farm, whose data it is, and the contract.
INSTALL
Who sets it upA unit is mounted once, by someone who is not an engineer, and changed later from a phone. No one comes back with a laptop.
- What engineering settles
- How a unit is added to a site, named and given its settings and alarms, what the installer sees, and what a user may change.
- Stays with the maker or the farm
- Where and how it is mounted, the enclosure, and what a setting means to an animal or a crop.
LEFT ALONE
Who is toldNo one is watching. For long stretches the product runs unattended, so an alarm stands in for a person’s attention.
- What engineering settles
- How alarm rules are set, stored and shown, and what the software does when data stops arriving.
- Stays with the maker or the farm
- Thresholds with a biological meaning, who answers at night, and welfare duties.
SEASON
Worth planning forUse is not constant. Units can sit idle for months, be moved, and wake when a season starts.
- What engineering settles
- How a returning unit reconnects, what happens to the gap in its history, and keeping software compatible with units installed long ago.
- Stays with the maker or the farm
- The seasonal plan, storage and power.
HAND-OFF
Who owns which sideThe device team and the software team are often two companies. The unit belongs to one, the portal and apps to the other.
- What engineering settles
- The agreement between firmware and software: message shapes, versions, who tests what, and how a firmware change reaches the apps.
- Stays with the maker or the farm
- The device, its firmware and its sensors.
Decisions that arrive late
Which decisions should an agtech product settle early?
Four decisions that are easier to make early than to reopen.
Who sees which site, after the schema
If the tree from account to unit is drawn late, every screen, permission and report has to be reopened.
How a unit is installed, after the app screens
Setup designed around an engineer at a desk leaves the person who mounts the unit to improvise.
Who owns an alarm, after the settings screen
An alarm with no named owner only records that something happened.
What software and firmware agree on, after units are installed
Once units are out of reach, every change to a message or version has to work with the ones already there.
The boundary
Indeema engineers the software side. The maker and the farm keep the rest
Two lists, kept apart on purpose.
The map is read at the edge of the field, beside the kit that made it.
Indeema engineers
- The portal and the apps people use
- Accounts, sites and units
- Alarm and settings configuration
- The cloud behind them
- Tests of the software against the unit
- How the software is updated
Stays with the maker and the farm
- The sensor and its enclosure
- The firmware
- Where and how a unit is mounted
- What a setting means to an animal or a crop
- Welfare and safety duties
- Regulation and standards
Farm-management suites are what farm operators run. This page is about the products that feed them.
What Indeema can own
What can Indeema build for an agricultural product?
Each part changes on a farm.
The portal and its accounts
Customers, sites and units, and who sees which.
The app people use on site
Built for the person who installs and sets up a unit, not for an engineer.
The whole product
When the device and the software should be one team’s job, the scope changes.
Hand over IoT Product Engineering Hand over Connected Product Engineering
A product that flies
An aircraft is a different engineering problem, with its own page.
What this has looked like
A sensor maker’s product, and what Indeema owned in it
The software side of a farm-sensor product.
A site and its settings, as a person using the product sees them.
- SITE · HAND-OFFSoftware for a farm-sensor product
A sensor maker for farms kept its firmware and sensor production and wanted the software side owned.
- Indeema owned
- Indeema worked on the software side: the web portal, the mobile apps and the cloud behind them, and tested the software against the sensor unit. The sensor and its firmware stayed with the client.
- What changed
- The cloud was reviewed and its performance worked on, and the apps were brought up to date with current phone systems. Customer accounts are held apart from unit data and settings.
Where to start
Start with the installation, not the device
An existing product whose software needs an owner
Start by reading what exists.
A hand-off that is not yet written down
Start with the tree from account to unit.
A product that is not built yet
Start with the installation: who mounts it, who sets it up and who is told when nothing arrives.
Bring us
- The product, and where it will be installed
- Who mounts it, and who sets it up
- What the device team already owns