INESC-ID has been present in Keep in Touch 2019 with the ‘IoT Board for Agriculture Applications’ demo, presented by the researcher João Tagaio.

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows the connection of different devices to the internet. Therefore, is possible to obtain a series of data and from them, extract useful information to the final user.  However, some challenges emerge in the communication area, in terms of protocols used and in the electronics area, where is necessary to develop chips that present a very low current consumption.

In this presentation, it was presented a Real Time Clock (RTC), developed by SiliconGate startup, with consumption in the order of nano ampere. Because of this, the chip is ideal for IoT systems where is necessary to wake up the microcontroller from a sleep state.

The Clock when generating an alarm wakes up the microcontroller which in turn reads the sensors data and communicate them through the radio frequency module. The thesis presented also consists of the development of an IoT system to precision agriculture where an RTC is used to wake up the system. The intention is to achieve very low current consumption levels in a way that the system could work with just one battery charge for years.