Challenge
Low-cost environmental sensors that look fine on a datasheet often drift or fail under humidity, dust, and monsoon conditions.
FIELD GUIDE · BUILD
Farm Optix field nodes
Smart-agriculture sensing for smallholder conditions—documented through honest pivot logs when hardware choices failed in the field.
Early testFarm Optix / TUAI
Role
Builder / technical lead — sensor selection, field durability decisions, and public learning notes.
Design decisions
- Prefer field durability evidence over raw datasheet accuracy.
- Swap to BME280 when humidity ingress and drift made the original sensor unusable.
- Publish the pivot so future collaborators see how decisions actually change.
Current state
Experimental field work with public pivot documentation. No customer counts or yield-impact claims are published here.
What I learned
- Datasheet specs assume lab conditions; weight field reports from real deployments.
- I2C swaps are cheap at the wiring layer—the cost is recalibrating downstream thresholds.