It was busy past few months here at ONDO! Along with preparing several customer installations, reaching out to potential partners, organizing our first Greece Demo Days and setting up next Demo day events (upcoming: Demo Days in Crete), we have also had intense development and testing going on, of cool new ONDO functionality.
And here are some of the irrigation, fertigation and climate control functionalities we recently released and already made available to ONDO farmers:
✓ Version 2 of ONDO Measuring Box
ONDO Measuring box allows for measurement of a number of climate parameters in greenhouses. Based on the data from the measuring box, ONDO software platform controls, in a very precise manner, the climate in the greenhouse, minimizing any potential stress for the plants resulting from climate changes. ONDO Measuring boxes are part of all ONDO systems and strategies for ensuring the best possible climate conditions for the plants, and their fast growth.
The previous version of the Measuring Box supported measuring of air temperature and air humidity. The new version of the Measuring Box also supports connection to some of the most common soil moisture sensors (Watermark, Truebner and others). In addition, the three new analog inputs allow connection of many other sensor types to the Measuring Box.
Thanks to enabling support of soil moisture and analog-input sensors, ONDO can now read and display in the ONDO software platform numerous extra sensor data. That data may be used to set up ONDO greenhouse automation strategies or utilized by ONDO farmers when taking decisions regarding the crop growing processes.
✓ The execution of automated irrigation schedules can now be restricted by the soil moisture levels
A key goal of ONDO precision automation is to ensure the plants get just the right amount of water and nutrients, only when they need those. The ‘needs’ of the plants are evaluated based on a number of factors, and the soil moisture is one of them.
Thanks to the additions in ONDO which we recently announced, the data from soil moisture sensors can now be regularly read by ONDO and monitored in ONDO software platform. The new updates we just introduced to the irrigation schedules allow to consider the soil moisture levels before initiating an irrigation schedule. Thus an irrigation program would not begin, even if it has been scheduled for automatic execution, if the soil moisture levels are beyond the limits defined by the farmer.
Thanks to the support of numerous soil moisture sensor types, you can define the soil moisture levels based on either centibars or % soil moisture.
✓ Extensive irrigation history is now available
The historical overview of your irrigation activities ensures that all your irrigation automations, as well as any manual irrigation actions performed, can be traced back in time, along with a full track record! You can get a detailed view of all irrigation actions performed – automated or manual – for a predefined period of time (today, last 3 or last 7 days), as well as query a specific period of time. Each historical record includes data on who initiated the specific action (user or the system), when, what part of the system was activated and a lot more.
The detailed irrigation history is essential so ONDO farmers can ensure that all automations are running as expected, and optimize them as needed.
✓ ONDO now supports multiple Control Heads
We have had customers using different water sources for their farms and requiring different Control Heads (systems controlling the full fertilization process – main pump, filters and the FertiOn fertilization system) attached to each source. Thanks to enabling support for multiple Control Heads, such customers can use a single ONDO controller to manage all their Control Heads and ensure cost-efficient automation for their farms.
It is important for us to ensure that the ONDO solutions are both functionally and economically efficient for our customers and we will keep making steps in that direction, every time we see an opportunity for optimizations.
There is a lot more new functionality in the pipeline and undergoing on-field tests. And we will be demonstrating all new features in our upcoming Demo events. Stay tuned – we might be coming next to you! Or, get in touch to suggest Demo Days for your own location 🙂