A nio service uses data from sensors in the soil in combination with the farmer's observations to autonomously control the vineyard pump and valves, delivering the optimal water flow to each vine.

Monitor, control, automate

nio allows you to use real-time data from the farm to build intelligent logic that turns a reactive, manual farming operation into a proactive, automated example of precision agriculture.

Distribute computing

nio enables logic to live wherever it makes sense within the farm's system–whether that is at the plants, the pump house, or anywhere between–to reduce overall network traffic and protect critical operations from outages.

Interoperable and asynchronous

nio's block framework allows you to connect to any sensor and listen to the real-time needs of the farm ranging from the soil and plants to the weather and infrastructure.

Every thing and every one is a signal

nio allows the most important signal producers, the farmers, to integrate their observations and generational knowledge into the overall system, allowing humans and machines to seamlessly work together to achieve optimal results.

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how we built our autonomous irrigation

Let's take a closer look at one of the many applications of nio at the vineyard: how the system intelligently irrigates the vineyard based on individual requests from the vines.

Probe/XBee service

A nio service listens to the soil moisture in each watering zone. Every 6 minutes, the data generated from sensors at various depths are transmitted via the XBee communication protocol.

Subscriber

A subscriber block subscribes to sensor data produced by the previous service.

User command service

A nio service listens to and publishes commands each time the farmer enters requirements via the user interface, including the desired root zones and high-low soil moisture thresholds for each zone.

Subscriber

A subscriber block subscribes to the farmer's commands from the previous service.

Append state

An append state block combines the farmer's instructions with the sensor data for each watering zone to create a new, unique data stream.

Mongodbfind

Three look-up blocks attach important historical soil data to this new stream of merged data, enriching the previous data stream even further.

Modifier

A modifier block transforms the data stream into the desired format that works seamlessly within the irrigation algorithm.

Irrigation model

A custom block containing a user-defined irrigation algorithm receives the formatted data stream and processes a series of real-time calculations.

These blocks calculate key irrigation variables for each root zone including saturation and maximum effective root depth.

The block also makes recommendations for the irrigation volume and schedule for each vine.

Modifier

A modifier block transforms the data stream into the desired format to be published to the irrigation service.

Publisher

A publisher block publishes the data to two places: a database that is referenced and displayed by the UI, and an irrigation service that subscribes to and acts upon its outputs service.

Vineyard (control) at your fingertips

A nio service uses the irrigation model outputs to autonomously control the vineyard pump and valves, delivering the optimal irrigation flow.

The user interface displays the data from the irrigation model to provide the farmers with real-time insight into their vines, enabling them to make intelligent recommendations for resource delivery.

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Improved crops

Quality is everything in viticulture. Unlocked information allows the farmer to optimize resource delivery and production strategy, dramatically increasing the quality of their grapes.

Fewer resources

Water. Chemicals. Labor. nio deploys each of these vital resources at the right time, in the right place, and in the precise amount, reducing use by up to 40%.

Decreased costs

Farming margins continue to decline. Remote control of routine operations and predictive maintenance eliminate several common farming expenses, reducing costs by up to 25%.

Peace of mind

There’s too much data for any farmer to effectively manage. Whether it’s disease, pests, weather, water, chemicals, or anything else that keeps farmers up at night, nio can efficiently monitor and react to it all with autonomy and intelligence.

- Phil Asmundson
of Deep Sky Vineyard

nio provides a platform for seamlessly integrating data from diverse sensors into a single decision center. By dynamically considering current weather conditions, forecasts, soil moisture, in canopy conditions and irrigation events, we're able to improve the quality of our grapes while decreasing our water usage by up to 40%.