Targeting core pain points in the implementation of traditional smart agriculture, including unstable network connections, difficulty in unlocking data value, and poor device compatibility, this solution focuses on farm scenarios with a mix of hilly lands and large fields. It takes the industrial PC as the core computing carrier, and links a full range of industrial equipment such as industrial routers and IoT gateway devices to build a low-cost, highly reliable full-area networking system, which realizes the full-link connection from field perception to intelligent decision-making.
This solution adopts a layered architecture of "on-site processing at the edge side + centralized scheduling on the cloud", bringing all agricultural devices scattered in the fields into a unified virtual local area network, completely solving the problems of no public network IP and inter-device communication failure in traditional scenarios.
The entire architecture is divided into three layers: the bottom layer consists of soil moisture, meteorology, pest and disease sensors and intelligent agricultural machinery terminals spread all over the fields; the middle layer is centered on the industrial PC, paired with industrial router, iot gateways and other equipment to complete on-site data access and preprocessing; the top layer connects to the farm management cloud platform to realize visualized management and control of all scenarios.
An industrial PC with wide-temperature and fanless design is deployed in the farm's field central control room, serving as the "local brain" of the entire networking system, which is the core design of this solution. It can independently complete three core tasks without relying on the cloud:
First, it directly accesses the farm's high-definition surveillance cameras and agricultural machinery operation video streams, completes AI identification and analysis locally, and judges crop growth and pest and disease conditions in real time. There is no need to transmit a large amount of video data back to the cloud, which greatly reduces bandwidth occupation;
Second, it builds a local lightweight database to store the farm's planting data of the past 3 years. Even if the public network is interrupted, it can still run the preset strategies for water and fertilizer regulation and agricultural machinery scheduling normally, avoiding production stagnation caused by network disconnection;
Third, as the core scheduling node of the local network, it uniformly manages all connected industrial devices, assigns access permissions to different devices, and prevents unauthorized terminals from accessing the farm's internal network. In response to the high temperature in summer and low temperature in winter, the wide-temperature design of the industrial PC can operate stably in the environment of -20℃ to 60℃, which is fully adapted to the deployment scenario where there is no constant temperature condition in the field central control room.
In the large field area, multiple industrial routers are deployed. Relying on the 4G/5G dual-card redundant design, even if the signal of one SIM card is interrupted, it can automatically switch the link to ensure the stable network connection of the water and fertilizer integrated equipment and agricultural meteorological stations distributed in different plots.
For some remote plots without broadband, the industrial router can quickly access the network without complex configuration, greatly reducing the wiring cost.
In the intelligent greenhouse area, IoT gateway devices are deployed to locally aggregate the data of the light sensors, CO₂ sensors, ventilation and roller shutter controllers in the greenhouse. With the edge preprocessing capability of the gateway, invalid data is filtered, and only valid information is uploaded to the industrial PC, greatly reducing the pressure of data transmission.
For a large number of traditional serial port-based old monitoring equipment in the farm, serial to Ethernet converters are deployed to convert the RS485/232 serial port data that could only be read locally into network data, and connect it to the entire networking system. There is no need to replace the original old equipment, helping the farm save transformation investment.
In the centralized parking and maintenance area for agricultural machinery, industrial switches are deployed. Relying on the ring network technology with fault self-healing in less than 20ms, the status monitoring terminals of multiple agricultural machinery and the data of charging piles are uniformly connected to the network. Even if a certain line is accidentally scratched and interrupted by agricultural machinery operations, it can quickly switch to the backup link to ensure that the agricultural machinery operation data is not interrupted.
In the free-range planting area 3 kilometers away from the central control room, industrial modems are deployed to transmit the data of low-power soil sensors distributed in the wild back to the core network through the 4G network, solving the problem of equipment networking in remote small-scale areas and realizing full-area coverage of the farm without dead angles.
After the entire solution is implemented, the network stability of the farm is increased to 80%, and no data disconnection will occur even during the high concurrency period of busy farming;
Relying on the local computing power of the industrial PC, the response speed of crop pest and disease identification is shortened from the original second level to the millisecond level, and the water and fertilizer utilization rate is increased by more than 20%;
At the same time, all equipment supports remote operation and maintenance, eliminating the need for technical personnel to frequently go to the field to troubleshoot faults, and the operation and maintenance cost is reduced by 60%.
The entire system is fully adapted to the mixed agricultural scenarios of large fields and greenhouses. With the high reliability of industrial-grade equipment, it makes up for the shortcomings in the implementation of traditional smart agriculture, and truly realizes the digital production mode of "data does not leave the field, and decision-making is by your side".
