Smart Farm

  After regularly attending Digital Agriculture Club meetings, Ankita Raturi, the club advisor mentioned that the lab she is from is always hiring undergraduate research interns. I never looked for research, but I really liked working with Ankita and the students from the lab so I asked for more information. I'm so glad I did, because it has been the best professional opportunity offered to me yet!

  I began working officially in January of 2025 with Tam Bureetes, a PhD student in the lab working on his thesis on small farms using data to aid decision making. We started by acquiring sensors, and as a nice into to lab work, I wrote up document inventory of everything we got.

  We tested each sensor for accuracy and noted resolution of measurements or any notes that might be important later. Plenty of time went into connecting the LoRaWAN to a gateway in our lab, after communicating with Purdue OATS for testing. We connected that gateway to a computer we built in the lab for general use. The sensors were working on LoRa and the gateway passed data packets to the lab server via MQTTX, entering a Postgresql SQL database.

  I had a break from school and poured time into leaning Angular framework and building a dashboard to display data from the database. Just this part taught me many things about Github, Angular, Python APIs, and general software development. I got to use material interface to make a dynamically loadable table with variable query and Leaflet for a map of the sensors out on the Purdue Student farm.

  I should take a minute here to give extra appreciation to my leadership. Professor Raturi has been so flexible and understanding with my learning, and Tam has been a legendary mentor to me. He has a great understanding of the development best practice and has explained the smallest details to help me learn. I understand the value of a good mentor now.

  Once we had this dashboard done, my responsibilities shifted. Tam began writing intensely as PhD students do. Now I am taking on new roles in the lab and preparing for my next project.