South Australian satellite communications company Myriota has partnered with water pump brand Davey Water Products to monitor remote tank water levels
The partnership will enable Myriota to add its Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity to Davey’s TankSense product range, enabling farmers to receive water level data directly on their mobile phones.
The product is expected to be commercially available in the second half of the year and will be the first mass-market water-level sensor to be connected via Myriota’s low-cost earth-to-satellite transmission technology.
It will help farmers manage water usage and monitor livestock water supply in areas where cellular networks are unreliable or unavailable.
Myriota CEO Dr Alex Grant said the product would benefit farmers who had faced exorbitant costs for satellite connectivity in the past or struggled to reliably monitor their water systems via existing technology.
“Our technology removes the need for farmers to rely on cellular networks with patchy coverage or spend large sums of money to connect to high-cost satellites. We’re excited that this partnership will lower the cost of water management in locations that up until now have had no cost-effective way of retrieving data,” he added.
The company launched its next generation of technology on Spaceflight’s SmallSat Express mission aboard Falcon 9 late last year.
Myriota Business Development Executive Tom Rayner added that while agriculture was an important industry for the company, it was also working on products for utility metering, environmental monitoring, defence and in the asset tracking and logistics space.
“We’re working with dozens of companies across a whole range of industry verticals and there are quite a few products in development. This is the first one we’ve announced and given the profile of Davey it’s one that we’re quite pleased about,” he stated.
“It’s a huge issue for people in Australian agriculture that they don’t have access to reliable, low-cost communications infrastructure, particularly for these IOT applications where the cost has to be ultra-low to make them work so we see a lot of demand here,” he continued.
Davey’s sensors are bolstered by their inbuilt AI capability, which relies on algorithms to increase the accuracy of predictions around when a tank will run out of water.
