Blog on OGLAS — Off-Grid Local Alert System

Why Your Farm Data Should Stay on Your Farm

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every smart-farm product on the market wants your data on their servers. Not because it’s better for you — because it’s better for their recurring revenue model.

Here’s why we built OGLAS to work the other way.

The subscription trap

A typical cloud-connected farm sensor setup:

$5–15/month per device for connectivity (SIM plan, API access, “premium features”)
Data held hostage — cancel the subscription, lose access to your history
Feature tiers — want alerts? That’s the Pro plan. Want more than 90 days of history? Enterprise.
End-of-life risk — company gets acquired or shuts down, your hardware is e-waste

Over a ten-year farm deployment — and farm infrastructure should last a decade — the subscription costs dwarf the hardware by an order of magnitude.

How to Monitor Remote Water Troughs Without Driving the Paddocks Every Day

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If your property has twenty troughs spread across a few thousand hectares, checking them all is a half-day job — and it’s a half-day you repeat every day because the cost of missing a dry trough is measured in stock weight, stress, and mortality.

Here’s how we designed the OGLAS Water Trough Level sensor to make that drive optional.

The problem with “just check them daily”

Time: Twenty troughs at five minutes each (including the drive between paddocks) is nearly two hours a day. Over a year, that’s 700+ hours — basically a month of full-time work.
Reaction time: If a trough runs dry at 10am and you check it at 4pm, the stock have been without water for six hours. On a hot day, that’s a welfare issue.
False security: “I checked them all this morning” becomes a reason not to worry — right up until the float valve sticks at 10:30am.

What the sensor does

Reports level periodically — default once an hour, configurable down to minutes during commissioning
Raises an immediate out-of-water alert — independent of the reporting interval, this message does not wait
Includes GPS coordinates with every reading, so the hub knows which trough is low without you maintaining a node-name-to-paddock spreadsheet
Reports its own battery voltage so you replace before failure

Why GPS matters

Twenty troughs means twenty node names, twenty positions, and twenty entries in a spreadsheet somewhere that nobody updates when a trough gets moved. Miss one update and “trough-7 is low” becomes a guessing game.

Building an Electric Fence Monitor That Alerts You the Moment the Fence Dies

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An electric fence that’s stopped pulsing is just a fence — and livestock work that out fast. The problem isn’t detecting a dead fence; it’s detecting it before you do the morning rounds and find animals where they shouldn’t be.

Here’s the design behind the OGLAS Electric Fence Active sensor — and how you can build one yourself.

The detection principle

You don’t need to wire into the high-voltage side. A small antenna held a few centimetres from the fence wire picks up the induced voltage from each pulse via capacitive coupling. Every pulse triggers a counter. No pulse for N seconds? The fence is down.

LoRa vs 4G for Farm Sensor Networks: Which Actually Costs Less Over 5 Years?

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When you’re putting sensors across a farm — gates, water troughs, tanks, fence lines — every device that needs a SIM card is a device with a monthly bill. Ten sensors at $5/month is $600/year before you’ve read a single tank level. Over five years, that’s $3,000 in connectivity alone.

LoRa changes the arithmetic. Here’s the real cost comparison.

The hardware

	LoRa (OGLAS)	4G/NB-IoT sensor
Sensor board	$15–30 (readily available LoRa board)	$40–80 (SIM7000-based)
Hub	$30 (low-cost wireless board)	None (each device phones home)
SIM card	None	$2–5/month per device
Enclosure + power	$10–20	$10–20
Per-sensor cost, year 1	$55–80	$100–160

The connectivity

Here’s where it gets ugly for the 4G approach.