And time marches on...

It has been a busy, busy time for the New Ag Business. This summer I drove back to Illinois and Iowa to install beta hardware to "prove out" the AyrMesh(TM) concept. It was an amazing trip, full of discovery and accomplishment, both professionally and personally.

Professionally, it was a huge relief to finally put this system into the hands of some growers so they could see the value it provides and give us feedback on it.

In each location, we installed a gateway node (on top of a house, attached to a router with broadband access) and a field node (solar powered) with a weather station and a field camera. At our Illinois location, the field station is 3/4 of a mile from the gateway; in Iowa, it is 2.4 miles from the gateway.

The systems have performed, albeit not flawlessly. There have been some small glitches, especially in the power systems. In early October, I flew back out there to update the systems and add more solar panels. We're still facing a few problems, but the radio systems have worked flawlessly since I returned.

Personally, it was a great trip - I saw my parents, drove across the Sierras and the Rockies, saw wildlife from Antelope to Pheasants, crossed the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, saw old friends and made new ones.

Now we are just putting our noses to the grindstone to get the first products ready for sale.

Backtracking a bit

It occurs to me that I have never really explained why we are starting the AyrMesh™ product line or even what it is. Better late than never...

The motivation for the AyrMesh product was born from a number of independent yet related observations:

1. Growers already have a number of wireless communication systems on the farm: RTK GPS systems, irrigation systems, two-way radios, cellular telephones, and, possibly, several others.
2. Each of these systems is independent, requiring separate base stations, clients, maintenance, and, possibly, licensing. However, they may still interfere with one another - unifying these into a single network can save money and time.
3. There are benefits to having these networks connected to the internet: access to RTK networks like the one recently installed by the state of Iowa, and being able to access things like irrigation systems via a web interface, for example.
4. Growers who have such networks find them indispensable, but they are expensive
5. For most growers, the only way to find out the condition of a field is to drive out and take a look at it.
6. For most growers, fieldwork data is kept on the flash cards in the in-cab computers on their equipment and/or on notebooks stored under the seats of the farm vehicles and is not collected and analyzed until after harvest.

Those last two points may be the most important. Point 5 really states that growers are wasting an enormous amount of time driving to fields to look them over, when time is their most precious commodity in the growing season. Point 6 means that all the decisions a grower makes during the season are made without the best possible information.

Setting up some minimal remote sensing equipment (rainfall at the very least; windspeed and direction, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure are easy to include, and, once you have those, soil temperature and moisture sensors are just as easy to plug in) in the fields will at least relieve the grower from having to drive out to the field only to find out it's too wet to work.

While good and even inexpensive weather equipment is available, no good, inexpensive weather stations exist that meet our criteria:

• Deliver information via standard Internet Protocol (IP),
• Can send weather data directly to a server via the internet and display that data as a web page,
• Have the ability to transmit weather data 5 miles or more wirelessly,
• Can be run off of a solar panel and a battery (no power outlet or AA batteries required),
• Don't require the use of a PC or server on the farm, and
• Cost less than a good used car.

We think there is also use for cameras in the field, either natural light, Infra-Red (IR), or near-IR, to help spot crop stress as quickly as possible. Of course, good weatherproof webcams can easily and inexpensively be integrated once you have the IP network available. What other data might be interesting to have collected automatically in the field?

One of the other things we have realized is that, today, all the remote sensing solutions available have the goal of getting data to the home PC. However, a grower belongs in the fields, not in the office staring at a computer. If the grower has wireless internet access in the fields, either via the field network or the cellular network, then a far better solution is to put all the data on a server on the internet where he can access it any time from anywhere - on any internet-connected device, from the computer at home to a laptop to a "nettop" to a smartphone.

This remote sensing capability brings terrific value to the grower, but, as we have learned in the corporate world and, increasingly, even in our own homes, once you have the network, it tends to find a lot more use than you had originally envisioned. We have a lot more in mind for this network... more on that later.

DEC, SGI, and now Sun...

(reposted from a post to the Sun Microsystems Alumni group)

I am rapidly coming to the belief that companies (and individuals) in the technology business want to be rich, happy, and long-lived, and the best you can do is choose about one and a half of those three.

If you want to be happy and live a long life, I think the company to emulate is Falafel's Drive In. Not what one might consider a tech company, but I don't know of anyone in the valley who hasn't eaten there, because they've been there for at least thirty years. I'm willing to bet there are no billionaires there.

What happened to each of these companies, IMHO, is that they were unhappy until they got rich. When they were rich, they wanted to be happy, and so they were. However, if you get to be rich and happy, your life expectancy goes down dramatically in this business, and so they all died (and I do consider Sun, alas, to be on life support with no real chance of recovery).

To be less abstract about it, each of them set out to build something better than was previously available - an undertaking born of unhappiness. These three companies were each successful and became rich. Once rich, they wanted to do what we are taught in business school: build barriers to competition to product our frachise. So they each used their own chips (made Intel unhappy), their own operating systems (made academics, already accustomed to the openness of BSD UNIX, unhappy), and their own parts, service, and support mechanisms (made small vendors, service providers, and do-it-yourselfers, like Google, unhappy). This meant they were rich and happy, which made unhappy people (in the case of Sun, they were Intel, Linus Torvalds, the PC vendors like Dell, and lots of others like Google) focus their unhappiness on Sun. Sun, being happy, chose to believe that toy computers and home-made operating systems could not possibly be a threat to them, just as
DEC had believed that silly workstations with their cryptic UNIX operating systems could not be a threat to minicomputers and SGI had believed that toy "personal" computers with their pokey data buses and little graphic cards could not be a threat to them.

I think there's an important discipline that good managers (as I at least imagine myself to be) have. It is easy and feels good to look at the product and thinks about how good it is and focus on all of its strengths. A good manager, IMHO, looks at a product and thinks about its shortcomings, what competitors might do to attack it, and how to make the next product make up for those weaknesses. Most importantly, one should look at the product's revenue streams and try to figure out how to cut it in half or less as quickly as possible. Why? because it's what your competitors are doing. It's a miserably unhappy existence, always leading to your company being less rich than you think it should be. But it's the only way to live a long life as a tech company.

Interestingly, the only "tech" company that seems to understand that is IBM. And I'll bet every IBM employee thinks IBM stock should be trading at $200-500 per share instead of the $100+ it's trading at now. Not very rich, not very happy, and living a long life.

As we work to get Ayrstone off the ground, I'm watching my former employers (Sun's only one of them... I have lived a charmed life in this regard) collapse, I cannot help but think about these issues and how to get around them. So this is what I believe today: if you want to live a long life, stay poor and miserable.

Nanostations, OLSR, and OpenWRT

Well, it has been an interesting period of time since my last post.

Please understand that I have been simultaneously working on the technical aspects of the Ayrstone AyrMesh(TM), updating the web page, writing the business plan, and preparing to show the product at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, CA.

So, first, the technology. While OLSR does definitely work on Ubiquiti's AirOS, the odd fact is that they have somehow messed with MadWiFi so that you cannot create a VAP running in adhoc or ahdemo mode. This, of course, effectively prevents the creation of a mesh network using AirOS.

Ubiquiti must have had some very good reason for doing this, but I have not yet had the temerity to ask them.

I decided at this point to start working with the open-source OpenWRT OS, a Linux distribution originally built for the Linksys WRT54G. It has been ported to the Atheros chipset used by Ubiquiti and runs very well on the NanoStations while providing a lot more control. I started by studing two existing meshing packages: RoBIn and NightWing. From them I was able to figure out how to build a version of OpenWRT that (1) fits in the 4 MB space on the NanoStation and (2) does what we want it to do. So far it's working very, very nicely.

A very nice added bonus is that it works perfectly on the new Ubiquiti Bullet2HP, which is better-suited to our purposes than the NanoStation. I have one of the early units, and it is working very well.

In the meantime, we showed the Ayrstone AyrMesh at the World Ag Expo and were very well-recieved there. People asked what we had and, when we explained, were simultaneously very surprised and very interested. Those who were able to fully understand the capabilities and potential of the concept were eager to try it out, although, in fairness, not everyone really understood it. This is the bane of the high-tech marketer's existance: figuring out how to explain technology so that people understand the full potential of the device - the facsimile machine being a "classic" example.

Meanwhile, we are polishing up the business plan and starting to look for funding. Anyone with a few hundred thousand that you'd like to use to buy into the next high-growth agricultural technology company, please form an orderly line...

OLSR on NanoStation 2

As noted earlier, I built the Nanostation firmware for the Nanostation 2 using the code and directions found here: https://wiki.graz.funkfeuer.at/UbntStations

You can get the code for the NanoStation 5 there, of course, and I have posted my build of the code for the NanoStation 2 here.

Please let me know if you want to try it out - bmoffitt "at" bmoffitt "dot" com

More from Radio Boy...

A friend of mine, a few Christmases back, bought me a couple of old serial books, part of the "Radio Boys" series, about a group of boys experimenting with radios (new-fangled, high-tech stuff). They make me smile every time I look over at them - from the 1920s, the language is somewhat odd, but the stories are cute.

I'm trying to find the "perfect" radio system for this product. The perfect radio system will be no-config - just power it up and it will figure out its role. Each node should automatically configure itself as a gateway, repeater, or client (or, even better, repeater-client). I know this is possible, because the Open-Mesh boxes do it. They're just not suitable for outdoor use.

So far, the Ubiquiti radios (I have been testing the NanoStation 2) have won the day - mostly open-source firmware, with a very nice SDK for developing new extensions. The only problem is that the only "meshing" protocol that comes with them is WDS with STP. It actually works pretty well, and will get the job done. However, it requires more setup than I like (not automatic configuration) and doesn't use the "best" encryption algorithm (WEP vs. WPA).

The Open-Mesh boxes run an interesting mix of software, and they can use either B.A.T.M.A.N. or OLSR as the meshing protocol. I recently changed my Open-Mesh boxes from B.A.T.M.A.N. to OLSR and noticed no difference in performance. Running either of these protocols would seem to be a possible solution, but I'd have to change my NanoStations over to OpenWRT, which I am somewhat reluctant to do.

However, I recently found a fellow in Austria who has ported OLSR to Ubiquiti's AirOS as part of a "free wi-fi network" project - see https://wiki.graz.funkfeuer.at/UbntStations.

So I downloaded the SDK, code, patches, and other files from ubnt.com and from funkfeuer.at, and made myself a firmware file for the NanoStation 2 (on about the fifth try - hey, I haven't done real software development for over 15 years!) I loaded it on to one of the Nanos, fired it up, turned it on, and it was running happily.

There are still some small glitches to be worked out before this solution is ready for prime time, so, for now, we'll keep going with WDS. However, the more I read about OLSR the more excited I am about it. The benefits for the Ayrstone customers are great.