Smart Water & Pisciculture

Description

Fish farming in Iran is booming, doubling employment within the sector and increasingly expanding production.
The increase in production is a result of the improved quality of local fish species and the development of intensive utilisation of imported non-native fish species.

The Caspian Coastline in the north of Iran is home to the main pisciculture (raising fish in tanks or ponds) producing areas and populating the coasting are its large breeding ponds.

The water quality is the most crucial factor affecting fish health and performance in aquaculture production systems. Different fish species have a specific range of water quality aspects (temperature, pH, oxygen concentration, etc.) within which they can survive, grow and reproduce.

Accurately monitoring water conditions reduces mortality rates by 30 to 40%. A solution to automate activities and reduce monitoring complexity will enable a stronger position in the market compared to others using traditional techniques.

The primary objective is to:

• monitor & control water parameters
• reduce costs
• improve quality
• increase production

Solution

Afarinesh Samaneh Mehr Engineering Co. (ASM), the Libelium official distributor in Iran, met the challenge to build the solution.

The values needed to control for the project are:

• water temperature
• dissolved oxygen
• pH
• ammonium and nitrate

LoRaWAN® is identified as the right technology as the solution is required to be wireless, easy to install, durable, long range, and have low power consumption.

Using Libelium Waspmote Plug & Sense – Smart Water sensors and the Waspmote Plug & Sens Ion Sensor probes running on solar panels for power, we have the complete self-sustaining sensor package to monitor all the water parameters required.

Application

1. The Libelium Waspmote sensors are installed aboard a floating platform with the probes in the water.
2. The sensors periodically monitor the water parameters and then transmit the encrypted data via LoRaWAN to any gateway within range.
3. The gateway listens and receives the device data, and via 3G cellular connection, forwards the encrypted packet to the cloud LORIOT network server.
4. The custom LORIOT binary installed on the gateway provides secure TLS 1.2 transport for the sensor data to be routed to the LORIOT network server.
5. Sensors and gateways are pre-registered in the LORIOT network server. The received data is authenticated and forwarded via API to the ASM dashboard developed on the Thing+ application.
6. In the Thing+ visualisation application, the data is displayed with clear charts and graphs in real-time on the computers and smartphones of the agricultural engineers.