Battery on OGLAS — Off-Grid Local Alert System

Analog

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS analog node is the workhorse. It’s a battery-powered wireless device that wakes up, reads an analog input, sends the value, and goes back to sleep. Same firmware drives sensors for soil moisture, light, voltage, level — anything that comes out as a 0–3.3 V signal.

What it does

On each wake cycle:

Reads an analog input (12-bit ADC, 0–3.3 V).
Sends the reading to your hub.
Waits for confirmation.
If no confirmation, sleeps briefly and retries so the hub knows the reading is stale.
Once confirmed (or after retry limit) deep-sleeps for the configured interval.

The reading counter and last value survive deep sleep so a power-cycle doesn’t lose history.

Water Trough Level

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS Water Trough Level sensor is purpose-built for stock water — the troughs scattered across paddocks where animals depend on a working float valve and a charged pump. If a trough goes dry, you find out before the animals do.

What it does

Reports level periodically — default interval an hour; configurable down to minutes when you’re commissioning, back up to once a day when you trust it.
Raises an immediate out-of-water alert when level drops below a configured threshold — independent of the reporting interval. This is the message that matters and it doesn’t wait.
Includes GPS coordinates with each reading, so the hub knows which trough this is without you having to track node-id-to-paddock mappings by hand.
Reports battery voltage so you can replace the battery on schedule, not on failure.

Why GPS

A property with twenty troughs is a labelling nightmare. Without GPS:

Weather

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The forecast for the nearest town is not the weather in your back paddock. The OGLAS Weather sensor is a station that reports your conditions to your own hub — and feeds the rules that act on them.

What it does

Temperature & humidity — ambient conditions, logged continuously.
Barometric pressure — the leading indicator of a change coming through.
Rainfall — a tipping-bucket gauge totalising what actually fell on you.
Wind speed & direction — for spraying windows, fire days, and structure-load awareness.

All of it lands in the same dataset as your other sensors, so “it rained 12 mm” sits next to “the tank rose 40 mm” and “the soil came up to field capacity”.

Electric Fence Active

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

An electric fence that’s stopped pulsing is just a fence — and animals work that out fast. The OGLAS Electric Fence Active sensor confirms your fence is live, on a schedule you set, and raises the bell the moment it isn’t.

What it does

Detects fence pulses — non-contact pickup (capacitive coupling to the fence wire), no high-voltage wiring into the device.
Reports state periodically — default interval is 5 minutes; configurable.
Reports immediately on state change — fence drops from active to inactive (or comes back), the device fires off a message right away rather than waiting for the next interval. This is the alert that matters.
Tracks pulse rate — a healthy charger has a known cadence. Drift from the expected rate (broken wire shorting to ground, low-battery charger) shows up before the fence dies completely.

Common failure modes it catches

Animal grounding — a sheep tangled in the wire pulls the fence voltage down. Pulses still happen but at much lower amplitude. Worth alerting.
Broken wire — fence is “on” at the charger but doesn’t reach the far end. Catch this by deploying multiple Electric Fence sensors at known points along the line.
Charger fault / dead battery — fence is silent. Most-common failure mode and the one that costs the most.
Vegetation grow-in — gradually loading the fence; the pulse-rate trend will show it before it fails.

Hardware

Battery-powered sensor with a non-contact pickup. The pickup is a small antenna held a few centimetres from the live wire — induced voltage from each fence pulse triggers a counter inside the device. No galvanic connection to the fence, so no risk of energiser pulses entering the electronics.

Off-grid power

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If your site runs on solar or batteries, every sensor’s power budget matters. OGLAS sensors are designed to spend most of their life asleep, and only the devices that need to listen continuously stay awake.

Battery sensors

The analog node and most “report a reading every minute” sensors:

Run on a single LiPo cell (3.7 V, 1000–2000 mAh is plenty).
Deep-sleep between samples — current draw drops to microamps.
Wake, read, send, wait for confirmation, sleep — the whole cycle is under a second of activity per minute.
Survive a full season on a charge for typical reporting intervals; longer with solar trickle.

We select hardware specifically for ultra-low deep-sleep current on battery-powered sensors. Slightly higher-power variants are available for always-on devices — pick the one that suits your install.

Soil Moisture

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Irrigating on a timer waters the calendar, not the crop. The OGLAS Soil Moisture sensor reads what the ground actually holds — at root depth — so water goes on when it’s needed and stays off when it isn’t.

What it does

Reads soil moisture — volumetric water content from a probe in the root zone; one or several depths.
Reads soil temperature — the other half of the germination and growth picture.
Reports on a schedule — hourly is plenty; deep-sleep between reads keeps it running a season on battery.
Drives irrigation — feed the reading to a Smart Switch: water only when moisture is below threshold and the weather isn’t about to do it for you.

Hardware

A capacitive soil probe (no corroding exposed electrodes) on an OGLAS analog node, battery-powered with a small solar trickle — see Off-grid power.