PRECISION LIVESTOCK FARMING

How IBT Systems promotes research on Precision Livestock Farming with ThingsBoard

Precision Livestock Farming is a hot topic both for farmers – from small companies to large meat groups – and public institutions such as academic research labs and experimental zooprophylactic institutes. Cooperating with several research centers, IBT Systems has developed a complete and flexible barn monitoring ecosystem, from the sensor nodes in the field to the processing and presentation of data.

research centers

barns monitored

0M+

data points per day

Challenges & results

What problem did they face?

Integrated, Flexible, and Cost-Effective Data Collection Remains a Barrier to Research Projects

Challenges

Integrate data from heterogeneous sensors
Provide data processing, storage and presentation within a single platform
Keep costs under control
Minimize development and maintenance effort

Key results

Complete automation of barn monitoring
Customized visualization for farmers and researchers
Ease of integration with external custom processing services
Seamless migration between self-managed infrastructures
Several research studies enabled

How it works

How IBT Systems supports academic research in Precision Livestock Farming?

ThingsBoard allowed very fast prototyping

Thanks to its intuitive and well-documented structure, ThingsBoard allowed a small team of young engineers to design and implement an eye-catching prototype of a complete dashboard in a short time, while maintaining a clear control on the service costs.

ThingsBoard barn monitoring dashboard built by IBT Systems

Fast integration with IoT devices

The prototype was right away used to start the integration of several different types of IoT data sources. The flexibility of input gateways and the variety of supported protocols allowed us to easily adapt to the peculiar data structures needed by the in-field system.

Oscilloscope used during the integration of IoT devices

Involving the end user to simplify system evolution

Thanks to the user-friendly interface for creating new dashboards, we were able to directly involve end users in the design process by collaborating closely with them. This allowed us to streamline and accelerate the development process and improve the satisfaction levels of the researchers involved.

IBT Systems team collaborating with end users on dashboard design

Comply with regulations

As public institutions, Italian universities and zooprophylactic institutes must comply with various legal requirements related to both software licensing models and the geographic location of their services and data. The ease of migrating ThingsBoard applications from the cloud-based solution to a fully on-premises implementation has made it possible to easily deploy the final solution while meeting all the regulatory requirements of this specific sector.

Hand presenting a compliance checkmark surrounded by legal and security icons

Industry impact

How ThingsBoard helps Precision Livestock Farming researchers improve operations with IoT?

Protocol integration

The support of Protobuf simplifies the evolution of the protocol of the IoT devices, while allowing the in-field gateway to be agnostic of the message structure.

Simple processing

The combination of powerful rule chain blocks with custom scripting allows implementing most of the typical data processing directly within ThingsBoard without the need for external data processing services.

Flexible API

The complete and flexible API offered by ThingsBoard allowed to feed complex external processing services implemented in several specific programming languages. Additionally, the APIs for device and asset management allowed to implement a seamless provisioning mechanism of our IoT devices through a mobile application.