Aquaculture Use Case
by Akiro
Aquaculture or Aquafarming is one of the use cases where technology has been gaining prominence in the last few years. Artificial ponds for fish farming have been there for quite some time now but the use of IoT devices to monitor pond parameters such as Dissolved oxygen level in the pond, carbon dioxide, Ammonia, Nitrate, pH, etc. has recently gathered pace. Monitoring these parameters on a regular basis is essential to maintain the growth of fishes in the pond and get better yield.
There are many examples where technology has helped an Aquaculture company with IoT
enabled Sprinklers, feeders and pumps being used to monitor the pond parameters on a
real-time basis and take necessary action.
Akiro enables the bi-directional communication between these connected devices used in the pond and collects the data on a real time basis. Low-code offering from Akiro also allows users to apply various operations on the collected data, transform the data and generate alerts/triggers based on the rules established. As a part of an end-to-end solution, it allows users to create the customizable Analytics and reporting dashboards to provide insights on the data to enable business decision making.
Ingestion
Data from the sensors at the base level is collected using various protocols such as LoRaWAN, TCP/IP, HTTPS and MQTT. One of the challenges here is the bi-directional communication with the devices as many of these protocols support unidirectional data transfer only, that is, from the device to cloud. Another challenge is to ingest this data coming from multiple sources to a single platform and make use of this data.
Akiro has built a protocol layer that allows data to be ingested using multiple protocols by using APIs that makes the integration aspect much quicker and easier. Moreover, our product supports bi-directional communication with the devices that helps users to send an instruction back to the devices to perform certain actions such as switch on/ off the device or change the parameters such as change the flow of water through the pump or the feed to the fishes.
Preprocessing, Alerting and Monitoring
Akiro is able to collect different kinds of parameters through the sensors such as Dissolved oxygen level, carbon dioxide, Ammonia, Nitrate, pH, etc. along with the pump parameters such as flow and pressure. Akiro has a strong Low-code rules engine that allows users to perform various operations on the data collected and monitor the data on a real-time basis for anomalies such as lack of oxygen level in the pond or the amount of feed to the fishes.
The user can either send a one-time instruction to the device to perform a particular action such as switch on the motor or schedule such an action to be performed everyday at a fixed time (say, run a feeder at regular intervals daily). The low-code rules engine can also be used to automatically trigger an action in case an anomaly is detected, such as increasing the oxygen flow if it goes below a certain threshold and generating an alert to the operations person.
Insights
As data driven decisions are gaining momentum across the organizations, it is essential to have Reporting and Analytics dashboards to gain insights from the data collected. While the importance of the right oxygen and pH level on productivity is well known, certain parameters such as the level of feed can be monitored on the regular basis and necessary changes can be made based on the data collected to improve the quality and quantity of produce.
Akiro provides the users with self-serve dashboards allowing them to create their own dashboards with the necessary parameters based on the business requirements. For example, a graph of feed over time can be plotted and Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) can be improved based on the inputs received from Analytics. FCR directly helps reduce the cost of inputs, hence directly helping in improving the yield.
