Sh3d — Embedded, IoT & Automation experts on Sh3d

Waves In Ice

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Waves-In-Ice (WII) are custom wave buoys deployed in the Arctic and Antarctic on sea-ice floes. Results from their long-running deployments have been published in Nature.

Dashboard — positions

Dashboard — single capture

Gateways

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sh3d builds custom gateways that bridge any device protocol — Bluetooth, LoRa, satellite, proprietary radio — to cloud services, while keeping a full local copy of all data.

Aspect	Detail
Hardware	Low-power, low-cost
Device software	Custom, purpose-built
Protocols	Any: Bluetooth, LoRa, LPWAN, Iridium
Local management	Full local copy of all data

Battery Management

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sh3d has built and managed battery systems for two decades — from lead-acid solar installations down to tiny embedded systems running on a single AA cell for years.

The WII wave buoys sleep for years and run in full-capture mode for months, automatically switching between capture, low-power and sleep modes to maximise longevity, reliability and recoverability.

Battery management is done at a low level: higher-level CPU loads and power drains are progressively shut down so GPS and communications can continue running, allowing a device to be located even when its main systems have failed.

MPPT

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In 2010 Sh3d designed a tiny MPPT to charge lithium-ion batteries from solar panels mounted on wave buoys deployed in very cold conditions. Battery management included temperature control and MPPT across multiple panels facing different directions (due to the physical design of the buoy).

Lithium batteries don’t handle low temperatures well — non-rechargeable alkaline cells are the best choice for extreme cold. Combining MPPT, careful battery and temperature monitoring, and fall-back alkaline cells, the buoys ran for many months even with rechargeable Li-ion packs.

LoRa

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Long-range radios

Sh3d has been using long-range radios for many years across farm, environmental and industrial sensing projects — both plain LoRa and LoRaWAN.

Aspect	Detail
Hardware	Low-power, low-cost
Device software	Custom LoRa and LoRaWAN devices
Edge software	Integration with local and any gateway

LPWAN

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Technologies

Cat-M1
LTE-M
NB-IoT

Access to IoT device protocols from Telstra and networks globally.

Satellite

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Satellite Communications

Useful for small amounts of data from places nothing else can reach.

Examples

Wave buoys

Antarctic and Arctic wave-buoy telemetry via Iridium — see Waves In Ice.

Farm sensors

Water tanks, weather stations and other remote rural monitoring.

Satellite Trackers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Many tracking systems have been built over the years, including those built into farm equipment and wave buoys. Sh3d also built standalone custom Iridium satellite trackers, used to keep track of multicopters in the harsh conditions of Antarctica.

By being stand-alone and independent from the main systems, these trackers acted as a reliable backup in case of device loss.

Computer Vision

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Computer vision is a very useful field. Instead of building a specialised sensor to monitor a single object — e.g. the position of a gate — the same job can be done with a camera. Automatic identification of trained objects (signs, gates, vehicle types) is possible.

Devices that can’t normally be monitored (e.g. an older device with only LEDs for output, which can’t be opened or modified) can still be brought into a real-time data system. Imagine adding oil-level monitoring to an old water pump without any modification to the pump itself.