Industry-leading energy harvesting technology enables accurate animal tracking

Highlighting the tremendous application potential of the company’s advanced PMICs, e-peas has confirmed that its AEM10941 devices for photovoltaic energy harvesting are being included in tracking equipment used in Australian cattle ranches. The company's engineers worked together with the team at Dutch systems integrator SODAQ on developing and implementing energy efficient livestock monitoring hardware for Brisbane-based client mOOvement. Through use of mOOvement’s smart tracker, valuable data on cattle herds can be obtained concerning their position and grazing patterns, with the capability to set alarms if individual animals are not moving or fenced boundaries have been breached. Fastened to one of the cattle’s ears, each tracker includes an accelerometer, a LoRa communication module (with a built-in microcontroller) and a GPS transceiver, as well as a passive NFC tag. “For this project, there were numerous technical challenges that had to be addressed,” states Ollie Smeenk, head of sales and marketing at SODAQ. “The evident power efficiency of the e-peas PMICs, alongside the strong lines of communication their staff built with us and the exceptional technical support they provided, all proved to be contributing factors that helped us to succeed.” “In the past, the cattle trackers available to farmers needed to be periodically recharged. This was obviously inconvenient, requiring a considerable investment of time and human resources. By being able to efficiently utilize the energy from sunlight such issues can be completely avoided,” adds Pieter Vogels, chief commercial officer at mOOvement. “Together, SODAQ and e-peas, through their respective expertise in IoT and energy harvesting, have supplied us with a system that is not only reliable and operationally effective, but also compact and light enough to be animal friendly.”