August 15, 2024
Agri.iO revolutionizes farming with Flux
“Without Flux, it would have taken me months to master another tool. Flux made it possible to design my first board in just a few days, even while I was working a 9-to-5.”
– Michael van Niekerk, Co-Founder and Head of Technology, Agri-iO
Agri-iO is an agriculture-focused automation company that augments people's existing farming solutions with connected hardware and software. They aim to solve the problems faced by farmers who have unreliable GSM signals by automating pumps and monitoring water levels in remote areas. With Agri-iO’s solutions, anything on a farm can be automated and driven from one application, even when there's no Wi-Fi or LTE.
Agri-iO’s Co-Founder and Head of Technology, Michael van Niekerk, has a technical background, but at the onset of the company, he had never designed a PCB. So, when it came time for the team to develop their first product, off-the-shelf (OTS) electronics were the obvious solution.
Agri-iO designed its original products using Pycom’s LoPy devices. These products included automating existing irrigation pivots, tank and dam control, and pump automation. These devices were selected because of their MicroPython-enabled ESP32 chipset and support for LoRa, Wi-Fi, and BLE connectivity. With electronics in hand, Agri-iO wrote its MicroPython code, and the team was off to the races.
It wasn’t long before they started securing large contracts.
However, right before kicking off an important new project, Agri-iO discovered that Pycom was going out of business, and that meant their products were discontinued. Suddenly, Agri-iO was left without a hardware solution and a contract to fulfill.
“We were originally using Pycom's LoPy devices. But the company went bankrupt just before we got a big contract with Zambeef in Zambia, and we found ourselves left without a supply.”
– Michael van Niekerk, Co-Founder and Head of Technology, Agri-iO
At first, Agri-iO’s approach was to find a replacement OTS solution, but they quickly found that the right solution was hard to come by. Most OTS products they encountered supported C++, not MicroPython, and porting the original code proved to be too timely and costly.
So that left them with one option: designing custom hardware. But this wasn’t as straightforward as it sounded.
For starters, Agri-iO had a two-man technical team. Neither Michael nor Stephan Geldenhuys (another co-founder) had ever designed a PCB before. With no support or experience, the team began exploring design tools to pursue their own custom hardware.
However, they found that the design tools on the market were far from perfect. Some tools proved too expensive for a small startup like Agri-iO to afford. Other free tools proved too cumbersome and difficult to learn in a reasonable time, and they were up against a serious time crunch.
“I considered KiCad and Altium Designer, but Altium was too expensive. KiCad was not easy to use, and we didn’t have time to get past that learning curve. Flux was a few steps ahead in terms of ease of use, so we went with Flux.” – Michael van Niekerk, Co-Founder and Head of Technology, Agri-iO
In their research, Agri-iO came across Flux - and it quickly caught their eye.
Flux’s free-to-use nature was the first big draw. The company had limited resources, and a thousand-dollar EDA license was not an option. What proved more important, however, was Flux’s ease of use. Not only was Flux browser-based and compatible with any computing platform, but its extensive library of resources made it possible for the team to hit the ground running.
Shortly after finding Flux, the Agri-iO team came across Flux’s design tutorial and project built around Raspberry Pi’s RP2040. Features and Rust support made the RP2040 the perfect microcontroller for Agri-iO’s needs. So, the team simply forked the Flux example project, and they instantly had a major jump start on their custom design.
From there, the team leveraged Copilot’s guidance to fill in the blanks. Copilot helped them by providing example designs, suggesting components and configurations, and answering questions about which pins connected where.
In only a couple of days, Agri-iO went from a blank slate and no experience to a manufacturable custom hardware solution.
“I used Copilot to ask questions about which pins to connect and to get examples for specific designs. It suggested components and configurations. Copilot reduced the amount of review work needed, and overall, it was a wonderful experience.”
– Michael van Niekerk, Co-Founder and Head of Technology, Agri-iO
Thanks to Flux, Agri-iO successfully fulfilled its existing contracts and has since deployed dozens of units globally. At the beginning of their journey, the Agri-iO team had never designed a single PCB. Today, they’ve designed four custom boards, each of which is deployed in the field and has a major impact on the agricultural industry.
“Nothing was more satisfying than seeing our system working in the field, and we really have Flux to thank for it all. Now I can’t wait for our next batch of boards to arrive and to start shipping them out.”
– Michael van Niekerk, Co-Founder and Head of Technology, Agri-iO
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