During his 2 months stay at Stellenbosch University, Aziz had the chance to meet the corresponding team and supervisor Riaan WOLHUTER located at the Engineering department of the University.
As part of his work, he visited an experimental vineyard where several sensing and data collection solutions are tested.
Several soil humidity sensing solutions (capacitive, electro sensitivity, etc) are being developed to improve and monitor the irrigation and sprinkle system. This is done in order to care for the current drought and limited water resources in South Africa.
The solutions are coupled with drones in order to generate humidity and thermal maps of the area. Robots are also used to conduct hard labor tasks (weeds removal, grape size color monitoring, etc).
Following this visit, Aziz, together wih Riaan, surveyed several LPWAN solutions that could satisfy the requirements and constraints of vineyards in Western Cape.
Based on their observations, Aziz worked alongside Denzil Christians to test and validate LoRa communication range within a life-size vineyard. The objective is to deploy a fully self-configurable multihop solution to monitor vineyards. Tests were conducted at Rustenberg wines vineyard.
Using two LoRa nodes: one as emitting source and the other one as a base station, they ran their experiments.
At the time of his return, experiments were still being run to estimate the maximum communication distance reachable with regards to the topography and variable vegetation of the area.
