DESIGNING A WIRELESS COUNTER FOR BALE PRODUCTION

Abstract

The immerge rise of crop production force engineers to design efficient ways for checking and inspecting the agricultural machines. Smart sensors that can monitor the temperature, operating time or even count the amount of the produced bales can fulfill these requirements. This can be realized by installing a monitoring device for the driver in the cabinet of the tractor that communicates over a wireless channel with the smart sensors mounted on the agricultural machine.

The target of this thesis was to develop the software and hardware of a device that is able to monitor the bale production process with the help of wireless sensor nodes to enable an easy installation process and low installation costs. The device should also be able to log and save the amount of the produced bales in a database which can be accessed from a certain website. This leads to the advantage that the crop bale production can be observed from almost every place in the world. The thesis describes the implementation of the hardware and software for a bale monitoring device and shows the results of the power consumption of a wireless node. Furthermore the reliability of the wireless channel between two nodes has been investigated.