Selected work 10

NodeRain — battery-powered field nodes for zone-by-zone irrigation.

NodeRain is a Swiss startup building precision irrigation for drip-irrigated fields, where every zone is watered on its own soil reading instead of on a fixed timer. The founder came to us with an idea: battery-powered nodes, each on a valve, talking to each other across a field. We designed the electronics, wrote the firmware and the wireless mesh network, and built the cloud platform and mobile app that run it.

Client

NodeRain

Switzerland

Industry

Agriculture and irrigation

Stage at start

An idea for a field mesh network

Volvix Systems role

Electronics, firmware, wireless mesh network, cloud platform and mobile app

NodeRain valve control unit with its solar panel — Fig. 01 — NodeRain valve control unit. The platform began with the mesh-connected field nodes described here.

01 / The product

Each zone of a field watered on its own soil reading.

A drip-irrigated field is split into zones. Each zone gets a node wired to its water valve and a soil moisture sensor. The node opens the valve when the soil dries below the level set for that zone and closes it once the soil is back in range.

The nodes run on 2 to 3 AA cells and need no cables in the ground. They find each other and form a mesh network across the field, and a single root node at the field edge carries all traffic to the cloud.

The grower sees every zone on their phone, names it, sets its moisture target and schedules its watering.

02 / Our contribution

An idea, taken to a working field system.

We worked with the founder from the first conversation. Our scope covered everything electrical and everything that runs in software: the node and root node electronics, the firmware on both, the mesh network between them, the cloud platform and the mobile app.

01Electronics and component selection — The node and root node boards were designed and their parts chosen for a battery-powered device that spends most of its life switched off: an ESP32-C3 module, valve drivers, a soil moisture input and a power latch. 02Power design — A pressure switch powers the node up when water reaches it. The node runs its valves, then signals its own power latch to cut the supply. Between runs the node draws no power from its cells at all. 03Node firmware — Each node reads soil moisture, drives its valves directly and waters within a band around the zone’s target. Targets are stored on the node, so watering continues through a network outage. 04Mesh network — Built on ESP-MESH. Nodes join and form the network without setup in the field. Messages are kept short and split into chunks, so every node is awake for as little time as possible, however many nodes the field has. 05Root node — The root node wakes the field by opening the main valve, passes each node its run times, and carries all mesh traffic to the cloud over Wi-Fi and MQTT. It also reports air conditions from a BME688 sensor and a rain sensor, and takes firmware updates remotely. 06Cloud platform and mobile app — An MQTT broker and database hold users, devices and readings, and handle provisioning of deployed hardware. The Flutter app lists every node in the network, shows each zone’s moisture and valve state, sets targets and schedules, sends the root node its Wi-Fi details, and notifies the grower when a scheduled watering has run.

System

From the soil to the phone.

Field nodes pass readings to each other across the mesh until they reach the root node. The root node sends them to the cloud over Wi-Fi, and the app reads and controls every zone from there.

Zone valve

One valve and one control unit per zone.

The control unit mounts on the zone valve and holds the node electronics. It opens and closes the valve and reports the zone’s state back through the mesh.

Client IP

Held by NodeRain.

All intellectual property arising from our engagement remains with the client.

03 / Where it stands

An idea for a field network, now the base of an irrigation platform.

Before

An idea for battery-powered nodes that talk to each other across a field.

After

A working system of field nodes, root node, cloud platform and mobile app.

NodeRain is taking the platform into vineyards and commercial agriculture.

All work → Our capabilities →

NodeRain — battery-powered field nodes for zone-by-zone irrigation.

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