News
NEWSLETTERS
- NEWSLETTER #1 (Jun-22): benefits of Edge-Computing, what’s inside the starter-kit, how can I build my starter-kit, … and much more!
- NEWSLETTER #2 (Nov-22): the INTEL-IRRIS Smallholder Piloting Program, improving the accuracy of low-cost sensors, extensive tests for calibration, the INTEL-IRRIS Irrigation WaziApp and WaziGate v2 is ready!
- NEWSLETTER #3 (Apr-23): INTEL-IRRIS PCB v3, the INTEL-IRRIS Irrigation WaziApp (IIWA) has a new User Interface, the INTEL-IRRIS coding challenge & competition!
- NEWSLETTER #4 (Sep-23): the new INTEL-IRRIS PCBs are available! WaziSense v2, integration of LoRaWAN sensors, towards WaziGate v3.
- NEWSLETTER #5 (Jan-24): Starter-kit v3 finalized, how to order fully assembled PCB, integration of AI.
Apr. 12th, 2024. Under the initiative of Pedro Revilla Temiño from the PRIMA DROMAMED project, 3 other PRIMA projects (INTEL-IRRIS, MED-WET and ReCROP) had a joint meeting to start collaborations. Presentations of these projects are:
March, 2024. INTEL-IRRIS is preparing its final events in Algeria (Oran city, May 9th, 2024) and Morocco (Rabat city, May 22nd, 2024). See https://intel-irris.eu/final-intel-irris-events. The program of these 2 events will have the same structure:
The morning session is dedicated to scientific presentations from INTEL-IRRIS and selected presentations from other water-related PRIMA projects.
The afternoon session is dedicated to a PRIMA networking session with short presentations from PRIMA projects at their early or mid stage, spanning all PRIMA thematic areas as well as NEXUS.
March 12-14, 2024. Second part of the training & capacity building session with the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit & related IoT technologies is happening in Nakai, Laos! The focus of this session is on how to exploit data from IoT and remote devices.
The INTEL-IRRIS field tester was also used to estimate the range of transmission for gateway positioning in the Nam Theun 2 lake for environmental surveillance applications.
March 10th and 16th, 2024. Customized INTEL-IRRIS devices, including devices for environmental monitoring and not only soil monitoring, built by Jean-François Printanier IRD have been deployed in Laos experimental farm to extend the first deployment realized on Oct. 12, 2023.
Feb. 28th, 2024. 3 PRIMA projects are joining force to address « New Technologies for Food Security and Sustainable Development » in the Smart Farming III event organized by the UORAN1 team. Pr B. Kechar presented INTEL-IRRIS’s results and the Smallholder Piloting Program.
Feb. 21-23, 2024. The Smallholder Piloting Program continues in Morocco with demonstration of the starter-kit and interviews of farmers. These interviews focus on the User Interface and feedback are collected to improve the user experience of the data visualization components.
Jan. 2-3, 2024. Under the lead of Dr Seiffedine Jomaa and Pr. Slaheddine Khlifi, the Tunisian team of the PRIMA OurMed project installed a starter-kit in Medjerba, Tunisia, in order to test the soil sensor technology.
Dec. 14-15th, 2023. After the General Meeting of Dec. 12-13 at WAZIUP e.V., the whole WAZIUP e.V., UPPA and IRD team worked hard to make the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit v3 ready for Algerian partner UMAB to take them back to Algeria!
Following the soil humidity device design proposed by UPPA, the starter-kit v3 includes the design based on the new WaziSense from WAZIUP e.V. and the design based on the dedicated PCBA from IRD. Both have on-board solar panel charging capabilities, allowing almost unlimited power autonomy!
The starter-kit v3 also features the new gateway 3D-printed casing and the WaziHat radio hat where an OLED screen can be directly soldered.
We were also lucky to receive all the ordered WaziHat from Chinese manufacturer one day before all partners had to travel back! The whole team was then able to assemble 16 INTEL-IRRIS gateways for the Smallholder Piloting Program in Algeria and Morocco!
Nov. 20th, 2023. The large order of fully assembled boards designed by IRD and UPPA arrived!
- 60 pieces of PCBA with RFM95W radio module for 868MHz, panelized in 3 pieces
- 45 pieces of PCBA without any radio module (the radio module, either RFM95W or RFM96W for 433MHz can then be soldered afterwards), panelized in 3 pieces
- 45 pieces of the raw PCB, panelized in 3 pieces
Nov. 9th, 2023. Pr Mohamed Benkhelifa from UMAB, Mostaganem, Algeria, presented the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit at the innovation & entrepreneurship event in Mostaganem in front of the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Kamel Baddari, and the Minister of Economy & Start-ups, Yacine Mahdi Oualid. Read the press article.
Oct. 20th, 2023. Pr Congduc Pham presented the INTEL-IRRIS project, its edge-AI approach and the challenges in deploying edge-AI for agriculture applications at the Datum Academy on “Continuing Education on Applied Artificial Intelligence”. More than 150 participants joined the online event!
Oct. 13th, 2023. The fully assembled boards have arrived! They will be extensively tested then larger production will be ordered to scale-up the Smallholder Piloting Program!
Top side: only the Arduino Pro Mini still needs to be assembled and plug onto the board.
Bottom side, the components for the solar charging circuit are already soldered, as well as the resistors needed for the DS18B20 temperature sensor and the Watermark tensiometer sensors.
Oct. 12th, 2023. INTEL-IRRIS soil devices are installed for testing in Laos experimental farm.
Oct. 6th, 2023. The first batch of INTEL-IRRIS fully assembled boards based on the new IRD PCB with low-cost solar charging capabilities has been ordered for manufacturing! Cost per piece is about 8€! The Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller can then just be plugged on the board. Total cost with external microcontroller is about 11€.
Oct. 4-7, 2023. The first training & capacity building session with the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit is happening in Nakai, Laos! INTEL-IRRIS was invited to the IoT & LoRaSat training session organized by CIREN & IRD with the support of AUF.
Participants were introduced to IoT and long-range radio technologies by Pr. Congduc Pham (UPPA). Solar energy management was explained to participants by Jean-François Printanier (IRD) while the very promising LoRa by satellite was presented by the invited speaker Fabien Ferrero from University of Nice. The INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit was then used during learning-by-doing sessions where participants were guided step-by-step towards the integration of a real-world IoT application with low power consumption constraints. The various training material can be downloaded here:
See also the News from the IRD web page:
Sep. 28th, 2023. 2 new tutorials have been produced for training and capacity building sessions:
- Tutorial slides on Wireless Communication Essentials – Understanding radio & LoRa technologies in IoT
- Tutorial slides on Training & capacity building with INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit
Sep. 21st, 2023. After final tests, the 2 new PCBs are available on INTEL-IRRIS GitHub. Read INTEL-IRRIS Newsletter #4 for more details!
July 28th, 2023. 2 new PCBs have been finalized to scale-up deployment of INTEL-IRRIS technologies in the Smallholder Piloting Program. Assembling time can be divided by 3 as the wiring of sensors and resistors is greatly facilitated!
In addition, the PCB on the right provide solar charging support while the PCB on the left embeds the newest LoRaWAN RAK3172 chip making it ready for worldwide deployment according to country-specific regulations.
June 7th, 2023. INTEL-IRRIS’s approach, methodology and results will be presented at the Smart Agriculture (Agricultura Inteligente) event organized by Panama’s INDICATIC AIP research institute on digital technologies and IICA (Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture). Many representatives from EU, US embassy and stakeholders were present. See the presentation in .pdf.
May 31st, 2023. New PCBs and microcontroller board are currently under extentive tests for the next versions of the starter-kit!
May 27th, 2023. B. Kechar presented the INTEL-IRRIS project at the SEED4NA workhop organized at University Oran 1 Ahmed Benbella. Download the program and the presentation (.pdf).
May 4th, 2023. The Algerian National Television channel (ENTV) broadcasted a TV report on the UORAN1 team lead by Pr. Kechar. The TV report highlighted the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit and followed the research team on a deployment in the farm located in Oued Tlelat. This is part of the Smallholder Piloting Program to test the starter-kit and get feedback from the farmers.
April 24th, 2023. The testing of the starter-kit for building dataset has started in AUA! Guillaume Gaillard from UPPA assisted AUA’s researchers to define and install the test setting. 3 versions of the INTEL-IRRIS devices have been installed: 2WT (2 watermark+temperature sensors), CT (1 capacitive+temperature sensors) and C (1 capacitive).
March 31st, 2023. Congduc Pham (UPPA) was invited at the Symposium on Transdisciplinary research for a healthy planet organized by the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne. He gave a keynote on “Digital platform and embedded AI to target the smallholder communities” presenting the main objectives and challenges of the INTEL-IRRIS project.
March 8th, 2023. Following the March 7th event at Abdelhamid Ibn Badis University in Mostaganem, El Hayat TV broadcasted a news on the event, highlighting the developed technologies for irrigation optimization targeting smallholders.
View the report on the journalist’s Facebook page
March 8th, 2023. The INTEL-IRRIS team (Pr M. Benkhelifa & Pr Said Nemmiche from UMAB and Pr C. Pham from UPPA) visited 3 farms in the Mostaganem area. The visit was organized by the Mostaganem DSA with the participation of the Mostaganem Chamber of Agriculture and Mostaganem association of vegetable crop farmers. Algerian TV was also there with a drone for video shooting.
Pr Benkhelifa was interviewed by the Mostaganem Chamber of Agriculture to explain the interest of the INTEL-IRRIS low-cost sensor technologies to better monitor the water availability and provide real-time data allowing optimization of the irrigation process.
March 7th, 2023. Pr M. Benkhelifa (UMAB) and his team organize an awareness-raising event in at Abdelhamid Ibn Badis University in Mostaganem, Algeria, with support of local stakeholders and the presence of their representatives: Mostaganem DSA (Direction des Services Agricoles), Direction de l’Hydrolique, Mostaganem Chamber of Agriculture and Mostaganem association of vegetable crop farmers.
A live demo of the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit on a small-scale irrigation test-bed will show how real-time soil humidity can help smallholders in their irrigation decision.
The event has been covered by Algerian Television channel and broadcasted on March 8th, 2023 on El Hayat TV channel.
Presentation from C. Pham (.pdf) and presentation from M. Benkhelifa (.pdf).
See all the photos taken during the event (Google Photo Album)
Feb. 22-23, 2023. During the February, 2023, technical meeting at IRD, Bondy, France, several scientific presentations for promising collaborations with INTEL-IRRIS have been presented: WIMARC project from NECTEC (Opas Trithaveesak, Thailand), PRIMA Watermed4.0 (Abou El Hassane Benyamina, Algeria partner, Oran) and Waqatali project from UMMISCO (Nicolas Marilleau, Bondy, France).
Dec. 21st, 2022. Pr B. Kechar from UORAN1 was invited by the Oran radio broadcast EL-BAHIA for the radio program “Terre de bonté” ( “أرض الخير” in arab) to present the INTEL-IRRIS project and to give more details on the starter-kit that will be deployed in piloting farms.
Dec. 14th, 2022. PACHA hotel & conference center, Oran. UORAN1 team lead by Pr Bouabdellah Kechar organized the awareness-raising event on “Innovative low cost technologies for a modern and sustainable agriculture in Algeria” at the PACHA hotel & conference center to bring together researchers, farmers, stakeholders and local agencies from Oran and Mostaganem area. Several R&D initiatives have been presented, including INTEL-IRRIS project where a live demo of the proposed starter-kit for irrigation optimization has been performed in front of many farmers and smallholders.
Pr Bouabdellah Kechar presented the various research initiatives and collaborations with local agriculture agencies such as Direction des Services Agricoles (DSA) of the Oran area.
Pr Congduc Pham presented and showcased the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit targeting smallholder farmers with a “plug-&-sense” technological solution. See the presentation in both english and french.
Pr Mohamed Benkhelifa presented the complex soil-plant-atmosphere continuum and the various irrigation techniques in use in Algeria. See the presentation.
Dec. 13th, 2022. ELMOUAHIDINE hotel & conference center, Oran. UORAN1 team lead by Pr Bouabdellah Kechar organized the INTEL-IRRIS technical workshop on connected agriculture at the ELMOUAHIDINE hotel & conference center to bring together researchers & collaborators from Oran and Mostaganem.
Pr Congduc Pham presented the objectives and challenges of INTEL-IRRIS project for irrigation optimization targeting smallholder farmers. He also showcased the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit with a live demo. See the presentation in both english and french.
The 4-hour panel discussions raised a large number of interesting issues such as how to efficiently address smallholder’s needs, how to work in a trusted manner with smallholders, how to integrate agricultural knowledge provided by both agronomists and farmers, how to deploy and build datasets for future AI-based processing, how to make the starter-kit more robust in harsh environment, and much more!
Nov. 13-14, 2022. University of Oran 1 (Pr. Bouabdellah Kechar) organized Smart Farming II.
Researchers, stakeholders & farmers are taking the opportunity to discuss on digitalisation of agriculture which is a top priority for Algeria.
November 13th is dedicated to presentations & discussion.
Pr Congduc Pham presented the objectives, the challenges and the achievements of the INTEL-IRRIS collaborative project.
Get the slides in .pdf.
November 14th is dedicated to visit of farms and with demonstration of INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit deployment.
Sept. 28th, 2022. Pr M. Benkhelifa from UMAB gave a keynote talk at the MOSTA’EXPO 2022 international event to present the INTEL-IRRIS project. See the published article from Algérie Presse Service.
Congrats to our Algerian partners for this great visibility action!
Sept. 5th, 2022. A prototype of the embedded INTEL-IRRIS Irrigation WaziApp Application (IIWA) developed jointly by UPPA and WAZIUP e.V. is ready for testing. The latest INTEL-IRRIS WaziGate SD card image already includes IIWA.
Embedded on the INTEL-IRRIS WaziGate gateway, IIWA adds sensor calibration and agronomic/agricultural knowledge to provide more accurate irrigation notifications: sensor type, soil type, plant type,… can be defined to better calibrate the low cost soil humidity sensors.
When connected to the INTEL-IRRIS WaziGate’s WiFi, test it quickly by connecting to http://wazigate.local:5000 or http://10.42.0.1:5000
Resources:
- IIWA GitHub: https://github.com/Waziup/smart-irrigation-waziapp/tree/intelirris
- IIWA tutorial slides
- IIWA video: to come
July 31st, 2022. Happy to announce that an interview of Pr Bouabdellah Kechar from University Oran 1 has been published by Algérie Presse Service. Pr Kechar presented the main objectives of INTEL-IRRIS and announced the launching of the Smallholder Piloting Program.
Read the full article from Algérie Presse Service. Congrats to our Algerian partners for this great visibility action! Here is also the original article from Le Soir d’Algérie.
June 29th, 2022. Happy to announce that a press article on INTEL-IRRIS has been published by “La Vie Eco du Maroc”, following the event organized by our Moroccan partner INRA Rabat and INRA CRRA SETTAT. The journalist is Mrs Malika Alami.
Live version: https://www.lavieeco.com/journal-electronique/#lve-pdf-24-juin-2022/21/
Congrats to our Moroccan partners for this great visibility action!
June 13th, 2022. Seminars on the application of the Internet of Thing and Machine Learning for Smart Precision Agriculture. Organized by Pr K. Baraka (ENSA Safi) and Pr J. Ezzahar (ENSA Safi and CRSA) at the International Water Research Institute (IWRI) of the University Mohammed 6 Polytechnic.
Download the pdf of presentations from the Seminars/Talks section.
June 9th, 2022. INTEL-IRRIS Smallholder Event organized by INRA CRRA SETTAT at the experimental domain of Sidi Aidi.
Great event targeting smallholders to present smarter irrigation techniques and the INTEL-IRRIS starter-kit to smallholders, stakeholders and startups! Dr Abdellah El Assaoui explained the principles of smarter agriculture in a very pedagogic and convincing way!
June 8th, 2022. Scientific day on INTEL-IRRIS and the challenges of Irrigation 4.0. Organized by Tarik Benabdelouahab (INRA Rabat).
Download the pdf of presentations from the Seminars/Talks section. More photos are available on this Google Photo Album from INRA Rabat.
April 1st, 2022. Webinar on Irrigation 4.0 (french language). Organized by INRA with ENSA Safi, UORAN1 and UMAB. Animated by Pr Tarik Benabdelouahab (INRA).
Download the pdf of presentations from the Seminars/Talks section.
March 30th, 2022. Seminar on low-cost connected agriculture with 3 presentations (french language). Organized by ENSA Safi with INRA. Animated by Pr Kamal Baraka (ENSA Safi) and Pr Tarik Benabdelouahab (INRA).
Download the pdf of presentations from the Seminars/Talks section.
March 11th, 2022. Webinar on irrigation in small-scale agriculture (french language). Organized by INRA with ENSA Safi, UORAN1 and UMAB. Animated by Pr Tarik Benabdelouahab (INRA).
Download the pdf of presentations from the Seminars/Talks section.
Feb. 23rd, 2022. Production of first round of starter-kits for partners has begun!
Presentation of the starter-kit
Look at the non-technical video showing production at UPPA.
Feb. 3rd, 2022. Finally the INTEL-IRRIS PCBs has been received! They have the INTEL-IRRIS logo and project name on it!
Jan. 25th, 2022. First tutorial video showing how to build the outdoor INTEL-IRRIS soil sensor device. See the video on YouTube (https://youtu.be/zcazzDbXvHk). More videos in the Tutorials/Slides section.
Dec. 8-9, 2021. Intel-IrriS had its first general meeting at UPPA with physical presence of AUA, IRD, UPPA and WAZIUP! The other partners were unfortunately on remote but we hope that next general meeting will be with all partners physically!
Nov. 26th, 2021. The generic soil sensor platform v0 has been released. See Results section.
Nov. 26th, 2021. PRIMA Intel-IrriS GitHub has been created! All software for soil sensor IoT platform with their associated tutorial resources will be available.
At Orange Radio Innovation Day that took place on November 10th, 2021, WAZIUP e.V. presented the latests trends in IoT and its experience in deploying IoT in Africa to empower local innovation.
Presentation by Corentin Dupont, Technical Director of WAZIUP eV.
First physical meetings with IRD and WAZIUP partners!
On Nov. 3rd, 2021, a technical meeting with UPPA (C. Pham) & IRD (C. Hartmann) at IRD offices (Bondy, France) addressed the complex soil-water-plant interactions. IRD showed the various facilities they have to realize extensive tests on soil-water to calibrate low-cost sensors.
On Nov. 6-9, 2021, several technical meetings with UPPA (C. Pham) and WAZIUP team led by A. Rahim at WAZIUP office (Dresden, Germany) addressed communication materials, hardware development lines for Intel-IrriS’s starter-kit and the Edge-IOT AI-enabled gateway architecture.
Project kickoff meeting took place on June 23rd, 2021!
Presentation of the project: download pdf