Tekt Industries a Key Partner for the Telstra Innovation Challenge 2017

INDUSTRY SECTOR: COMMUNICATIONS

Tekt Industries, in partnership with Telstra, have created an innovative IoT Development Kit which has opened up a world of possibility for connected Agritech implementations.

This year's Telstra Innovation Challenge (in partnership with Landmark) was a keen race to create the best and most innovative IoT solution for some of the many challenges that Australian farmers face. Running from March to May, University students, enterprise, and the general public (competing in separate streams) threw themselves into a no-holds-barred competition to revolutionise the way we use technology to monitor, control and automate agriculture.

Tekt Industries was honoured to partner with Telstra to create the Telstra IoT Development Kit, the key hardware kit initially given to participants in the challenge. This hardware was based upon a pairing of an open Arduino platform for user specific code and a custom coprocessor system which transmitted data via the Telstra Mobile LTE network to Cumulocity and Microsoft Azure IoT.

In layperson's terms, the Telstra Development Kit allowed participants to connect a board created by Intel, the Genuino 101, to the Telstra 4G network with CAT-1 class data transmission rates. This IoT class embedded hardware empowers developers with the ability to connect small, cheap, low-powered devices such as single sensors or buttons to the internet, facilitating data-transfer to remote cloud servers as well as more complex decision based control actions. The "IoT Shield" makes connection to the LTE network almost effortless and thus enables countless possibilities and applications. (Here is a video of Matt Sinclair from Telstra describing the basic capabilities of the IoT Shield)

While there are other devices on the market which perform similar functions, the Telstra IoT Shield is a game-changer in several ways. Firstly, it is significantly cheaper to produce than all other available alternatives. Secondly, it is much smaller than the alternatives. Despite the technical challenges, Tekt Industries made the resultant hardware both compact and more capable than existing alternatives so that the Genuino 101 host processing board was seamlessly integrated. Thirdly, the Telstra IoT Shield is incredibly powerful. The Shield's custom embedded co-processor is more powerful than the host Genuino board. This key design decision created an avenue for the embedded engineers at Tekt to shift some of the communication and security sub-system complexity away from the user code whilst also adding sensor and network socket connection management functions. This embedded co-processor technology made the IoT Shield an impressively user-friendly device to program.

Applications of the Telstra IoT Shield in the Innovation Challenge 2017 were varied, impressive and inspiring. The winners were DiUS, who designed an intelligent fertiliser tank which tracks conditions and fertiliser usage; Team CQU, who designed a fertigation solution to better control delivery of nutrients to crops; and Farmate, who designed the "Bee Secure" hive monitoring solution, which allows famers to not only track all conditions in their hives in real time, but also alter those conditions to maintain an optimum environment for the bees. (For more information on these projects, see the Telstra website)

The Telstra IoT Shield is a great showcase of hardware containing a lightweight, low power, cost-effective, and accessible CAT-1 class LTE communications system using an Arduino board. This technology will make future development of IoT class devices more accessible for hobbyists, students, and other developers. The use of this new technology will result in profound changes to the agricultural industry through application of the latest in IoT technology.

Tekt industries delivered the Telstra IoT Shield both on time, and on budget, in preparation for the Challenge and it has been heralded by Telstra as "a key enabler for the future of IoT connectivity".