 Welcome to this tech talk on remote water monitoring. Our speaker today is Mike Hayes from Intuit. I've spent 15 years in AG services and in AG industries prior to his life at Intuit. He focuses most of his energy on communication equipment for remote networks and the implementation of monitoring and automation systems supported by this network. We welcome Mike. Thanks Mike. Thanks Davey for the opportunity to talk. And I suppose for us any opportunity to give people an insight into not just what our business does but also what other stuff is available out there that people may not be aware of. Here we are. We're a little business based in the southeast of South Australia down at Naracor but cover pretty much all of South Australia and anywhere else people wish to go. And the main drive of our business is to fill the gaps where the bigger players don't operate. I.e. there's no point us going to do something in Mount Gambia or Adelaide or anywhere like that because they have a multitude of ways to connect and distances aren't normally an issue for them so whether it be our telemetry work or internet related gear is really about filling gaps that most people are aware causes submission in regional South Australia. Myself and my brother, Dan's been probably doing it for about three years longer than me. I've been going for about seven or eight years and along with our staff in other parts of what we do it keeps us all busy I can assure you of that. So we'll get presentation underway. Big questions first. Just so you don't have to wait until the end, what does it cost? I normally try and cover this first and that's largely because people inadvertently all sit there and go well that's all great but how much is it going to cost me? So really if you're doing our type of network we do other types which go through telephone and through hotels for an optis network or satellite and those types of things but it doesn't really operate in the core of what we're trying to achieve which we'll go through a bit later on. So essentially if you had 10 water points, one repeater and a homestead to give you 12 locations and it's about three and a half to four grand per location so it's going to be about 36 to 48 grand to do that type of set up and the economics of that really comes back to labour replacement and how it could be you can get a return on I'm sure plenty of people have seen calculations of driving around time saves and all those sort of things. Each one is different and everyone has the opportunity to do those calculations on their own. So for us it's not a situation where it's cheap but it needs to be cost effective. So our system is based on the type of systems that we install based on the premise that when things go bad you don't want to get any bills. I.e. if you've had to de-stock and you've had to shut things down then you don't want a situation where you're going to have to continue to pay for monitoring or automation when you've got no livestock there or if you don't have any crops in the ground. So what do you actually get for your money? You don't get any monthly charges. You don't get any internal internet costs and you don't get the internet bills. All of our equipment works internally so that you have your own network and that's how you get around all the ongoing costs. Plus it doesn't put any limits on what you want to be able to do on it. That's entirely up to you. Where we really do differ is that if you own your own network or type of network that we put in you don't have any bandwidth limitations for that price. I.e. we have plenty of networks that will have five cameras on them and on the same type of networks we can run 150 cameras. No extra cost per month. No extra equipment required. It's just what you decide to put on. Steady tight for us in those examples I was just showing is where you do have a camera on a trough and a camera on the tank. So the reason for the variation in pricing between 3.0 and 4.0 brand is what you decide to put on. Whether you wish to have two cameras or three cameras or four cameras or whether you want to have Wi-Fi calling from a tank or whatnot and we'll cover all that more in depth with you later on. And that was what I just discussed. Motivation. People install this type of technology. Essentially we're in the labour replacement industry. It's a funny thing where we can go around and oh we do it for this reason we do it for that reason. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that really like to have a situation where you have another couple of people on farm to help you out. But there's one reason that we don't. And that's because labour is expensive and coupled with hard to get. So really in terms of all of the things that monitoring and automation is today's world it's difficult to afford to have full-time staff on farm. And therefore we're looking for ways to not have the people on farm but and to be able to do more cost the same jobs more cost effectively. IE water monitoring. So option A we partner an employer to check a tank that 95% of the time didn't need any checking. Yep, thanks for driving along. Yep, thanks for driving the next one. Yep, thanks for driving the next one. But check the same tank and 100 others yourself while out late over and at the Bradman Bar believe it or not, that's actually a true example. People that do go to the cricket along with myself and keep an eye on things while they're away. Also if you happen to have a holiday anywhere else around the place you can still achieve the same thing. We're all started for us. Six years ago is probably more like seven years ago now. Think about it. I'm going to talk a little bit about it. I'm going to talk a little bit about it in a minute, which is about 60 K's west of Pimba. The owner Sam Ingalls is my brother's wife's first cousin and they are at Christmas dinner in Clare. They were talking about it and trying to come up with a way to try and stop all this driving around and paying people to drive around to do the same job. There's got to be a better way. So my brother did say that. Hang on, I've got a phone call that I thought was on what do you call it, airplane mode? That's right. I thought it was on airplane mode, obviously not. I did it to his retons then when we had to do those file trains. No, you're right. Just start again here. Start that section about where it all started. Yep, just go from there. So where it all started for us was where I'm in it. My brother Dan and I work with his wife, Kathy's. She's from the Mid North from Yacca and they are sitting in Clare at Christmas dinner and Sam, who's first cousin, said, we're a minute driving around checking tanks. There's got to be a better way than this. So my brother said, oh, that's all right. I'll get Mike on that. He'll know how to do it. I've got him for the first job. Pretty much that remains unchanged to this day. The original design and equipment that went in has pretty much remained unchanged. With one camera on a tank, one camera on a trough, they do have traps rather than conventional mustering for cattle. And since then there has been, I think we've got one, one, two, three, four pumps that get started along with a few other things that have been added on. These are the types of projects that we get asked to tackle. This is the Moorla-Watman just on the Strazliki track. And people ask us to do some things which on the surface seem to be not necessarily unachievable, a little bit more difficult, require a bit more thought. And that was to have a system that would cover the whole property. And that would be able to monitor waters, monitor stock, rain, keeping contact with others, being able to make phone calls, send texts. The next bullet point there where they're highlighted where it's, that was upgradeable, so that in three or four years' time, when equipment became redundant, that it'd be easy enough for it to be, and cheap enough for it to be upgraded. That it was easy to maintain away, not having to wait for someone to drive all the way from Adelaide or Melbourne or fly down from Brisbane or somewhere to fix it, that they'd be able to do it themselves, and that there wasn't any ongoing fees. I said, yep, that's all fine, leave it with me. So I thought about it for a couple of days, and came up with a couple of ideas, and yeah, it went from there. So all what has been going for a couple of years now, and we did actually achieve all of those things. The types of coverage, a lot of people go, well, that's all great, but I've got a very large property, or a remote property, or whatever else. This is a Mapabilica lino, which is halfway between Rockford Downs and Cooperpeedy. You can see the farm sizes on towards the top of the map, and yeah, we've successfully covered all of those little water points that go circled for me, and a few others since then. So the area and distances is not a problem for us. It does add cost, there's a little bit more work, but ultimately at the end of the day, you're trying to limit the labour and limit the driving as much as possible, and this is one way to do it. So what do we use this type of technology? Or how do we select the type of technology that we use? We try and use the same technology that you have at home. And the reason for that is that it uses the same technology that drives the internet. The same way that we're able to do this webinar is the same type of technology, computer technology, internet technology that we use around the world. It provides one platform for anything that is networkable, i.e. it doesn't matter whether it's a printer, if it's a computer screen, if it's a laptop, if it's a phone, that all of those things will work on these networks. And what it does is really allows us to move into the realm of mass-produced type products so that the price of this stuff becomes achievable. A lot of the types of things that we'll talk about a bit later on have been done in mining for 15 years, but where they were paying $30,000 to do a job, we're trying to do it for three. So using open source equipment is an important part of how we design our things. And once we've got all those things placed, it does actually provide a road for agriculture to move forward because it is the same type of technology as the rest of the internet. And as I've spoken about that, it does help to keep the price down dramatically and also the availability of equipment. This is the interface that we use. For one of the solutions that we have, this is one of the camera networks. You'll see on the right-hand side that you can click on each individual camera from a live view point of view or on the right-hand side where in the menu down the left-hand side, where it says live view, you can put eight or 10 or 15, 20 cameras to look at simultaneously. You can put a lot more cameras. It's just become quite small in your computer screen. There's also a phone app that you can run with this. And from there, it depends what else you want to add on, pump start, those types of things. As I said, all our components are available as open source. We don't like being tied in, same as anyone else. If you see something really cool on eBay and you think, yeah, that's really going to suit what I want to do, you can leave it. As long as you can connect it with a blue computer cable or with Wi-Fi, it'll work. And what that allows us to do is use lots of production, lots of different suppliers to achieve the endpoint. And most of those parts, once we've got the network in, in between one to $200, the little radio that sits up at the top that's capable of talking 40 kilometers or further, there are $175, a little computer switch that everything gets plugged into inside the box. There are about $145, something like that last time I looked. The system runs on 12-volt, it's a 12-volt, 12 to 18-volt solar panel. And if need be, it can drive up to the lampers and put the jump leads on a little guy. It's nothing expensive in each individual component, i.e. if at all someone leaves their handbrake off and land cruiser and goes careering down the hill and crashes into one, then you only got to replace each individual component and not actually the $3,000 again. Why do we, why do we do cameras, not sensors? It's not that we don't do sensors, it's just what we believe as a sensor is a way to give a feedback loop. And with a camera, you can actually see what's going on. Seeing is believing. You can't get a false positive in this situation. You can't get a situation where a salt builds up around one of the sensors or sensor gets jammed or bird creates bird nest on the sensor because you'll see all of those things going on. As you can see, and this is the water flowing into the, into a tank. Our type of networks, you control what's going on. Let's us operate where you normally cannot. So this here was, was myself driving out of Billicolina. We've been up in the rocket range. Yes, we're actually allowed to be in there. We're on our way out. I was just trying to prevent anyone else going in. But we can actually operate where the others can't. And in some situation where NBN can't. IE, you can't get an NBN connection stuck on a water tank out in the middle of nowhere. There are some of the other people that provide the length through equipment, farm bot, eco-sat, those types of people. And they do operate in areas where we can't. But under those regimes, it operates against that philosophy of what we have, which is no ongoing cost. And that, for example, and that for us, we don't care what sort of bandwidth people want to pull through. If you want to pull 100 cameras through live feed, well, that's all right. Pull 100 cameras through live feed. The only ongoing cost would be if you wanted to go on a 12-month annual leave and you wanted to use all of your internet to try and pull 100 cameras through to Fiji. Unlikely to happen, I would suggest. What do the internal networks provide? It's multi-purpose platform for anything that's internet-enabled. As long as you can play that blue computer chord into it or you can use Wi-Fi, it'll work on this network. It's live access. It's not a pulse. It's not every 15 minutes. If you decide you want to start a pump, you click the button and the pump will start. There's no monthly SIM cards required. There's no licenses. No monthly support charges. You can repair and replace equipment yourself. With guidance, generally, when we set the networks up, we get people to help us so that they learn how the network operates and how to do maintenance and troubleshooting themselves. And as we just discussed, the average replacement is about $200 per component. The investment in networks is not just limited to the one purpose. That's an important difference. People are probably reasonably familiar with types of automation and not just agriculture in other industries. There's just a few of the other things that we've been asked to automate in the last couple of years. This following pump is one that's an hour-and-a-half round trip from the homestead. It's a Kuna. The pump has to be started every day over summer and runs for about eight or 10 hours. Unfortunately, in the past, once you left the pump, there was no real way to know that it was running. So this is the interface that we used to start stopping and running the pump itself. Just a simple click on the buttons on the right-hand side. You can click the Run button, click the Stop button, where you can run it for 12 hours. So when you use the Run 12 Hours button, the pump will run autonomously, i.e. if you lost an internet connection, well, sorry, if you lost a network connection or you didn't have access to it or whatever, it'll look after itself. The control is actually at the pump. And then the start motor is the crank. So this is actually the motor itself. So what you'll see in the middle of the screen there is the little linear actuator. I'll be quick, because it will start to pull in. And then you'll see a pigeon that starts to come down from the right-hand side. We'll see that as Mr Occhial is in safety, just checking out and making sure everything's okay. And then the motor will start. What you'll see shortly is once the motor has started that that actuator just below the fuel tank pushes in and pushes back out, sorry, then the motor will stop. These pumps, as I've just described, can be started and start from phone, computer, anywhere, anytime. Not only that, once you leave the site, you actually can check in at any point in time and check on that pump to make sure it's still running, hasn't run out of diesel, hasn't had some vermin get tangled in the belts and run the belts off. And then you can actually click on the tank and make sure the tank does have water running into it. So there's also an example here of some other types of scenarios where we have like cameras in tanks, water troughs, go traps, all those types of things. Wifi calling and internet repairs. On an Optus type sort of system, if people have got Optus since 80 bucks, get you 500 gig. This one here is in the Gawler Rangers. So it's a 30K link, and then a couple of Ks down to the homestead. Broadcast Wi-Fi around the station quarters, kids doing schoolwork, those types of things. School of the air and provides all residents with, not mobile phone in terms of a Telstra connection, but it does actually allow for Wi-Fi calling. So generally what we do is set the same Wi-Fi calling system up at each water tank, or if you want, if you look higher on top of that mast, you can see what looks like a piece of PVC. If you set up car kits, then you can do about a 15 kilometre, a little bit further, maybe 20 kilometre line of sight, and back to those repeaters. And then you can create a Wi-Fi hotspot in your vehicle, and then you can use that to use Wi-Fi calling. Works quite well. The first one I ever made was on a zangernabilic liner. It was quite good fun. It was late in the afternoon, over a couple of years, because I thought it might actually work, and it did. Some of those other concepts that we do use is a bit of a side point to telemetry, but it's some scale and scope of the gear. This is one of our internet networks, or our internet networks in the southeast. Another part of our business is actually delivering internet into people's houses, effectively in competition to NBN and Telstra and Optus. The only real reason to put this slide up is that we do actually know what we're doing. It's not a fly-by-night thing, and that it's actually backed by some guys that actually do really understand what we do and we've been doing it for a long time. We have a lot of fun doing it. For people in other parts, we do actually do some work with Beam out of the Barossa, and for people in the mid-north, that know Gorda Connect. Some of our back-end internet provision does actually come out of Adelaide. They're all little side points, but more just to give some confidence to people that haven't had a word of mouth referral that we do cover a reasonable amount of the state. The Red May and War Growth program is an initiative of primary industries in region South Australia and supported by Meet and Livestock Australia, the South Australian sheep and industry funds, and Sheep Connect South Australia.