Nordic nRF9151 SiP-powered cellular IoT and Bluetooth LE seed monitoring platform drives efficiencies in smart agriculture

QuarterPoint LLC uses nRF9151 SiP and nRF52840 SoC to power Seedbox Solution’s Smartbox Platform, delivering enhanced visibility to the Ag industry

QuarterPoint LLC, formed as a partnership between Seedbox Solution and Trace Engineering, is providing a tailored version of its cellular IoT and Bluetooth® LE monitoring products to power Seedbox Solution’s Smartbox Platform. The ‘Smartbox’ is an IoT-enabled version of the ‘Seedbox’ – a large returnable container used by seed production companies and farmers across the U.S.

The Smartbox Platform allows seed producers, dealers, and farmers to monitor the environment, location, container fill level, and overall quality of their seed inventory - down to the individual package level. By combining product data, inventory status, and environmental metrics, this technology delivers unmatched supply chain visibility, previously unattainable to this fragmented market.

The nRF9151: a new standard for highly integrated and compact SiPs

While the original Smartbox (launched in December 2022) successfully employed Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF9160 SiP, the upgraded Smartbox solution uses the next generation Nordic nRF9151 low power SiP – a new standard for highly integrated and compact SiP solutions specifically designed for cellular IoT and DECT NR+ applications.

The Smartbox employs the nRF9151 SiP’s powerful 64 MHz Arm® Cortex®-M33 programmable application processor with generous 1 MB NVM and 256 KB RAM to collect and process the data from various integrated sensors – including temperature, pressure, humidity, and acceleration. Using the nRF9151 SiP’s multimode LTE-M/NB-IoT modem and GNSS, the device transmits the collected sensor data and device location to the Cloud, where it can then be accessed via the associated app or web-based platform.

“This data provides producers with valuable insights to help optimize inventory management, improve forecasting, reduce seed waste, and ultimately deliver higher-quality seed to customers,” explains Joe Waldman, President of QuarterPoint LLC. “Utilizing sensor fusion and machine learning models, we were able to streamline the solution to a single device that can gather all relevant information, providing Seedbox Solution with an elegant and truly scalable product that meets the needs of its customers.”

Nordic Semiconductor stands out for the industry-leading low power capabilities of its products, the rich set of device peripherals, and the fantastic sales and technical support provided by the company.

Kevin Grimstad, CTO at QuarterPoint

Additional Power Class support for greater design flexibility

Compared with its nRF91 Series predecessors, the nRF9151 features a significant footprint reduction of 20 percent (measuring 12 by 11 mm) and brings additional support for Power Class 5 20 dBm output power, complementing the existing Power Class 3 23 dBm, which provides great design flexibility as it eases the requirements for battery-powered products like the Smartbox.

In addition, the latest Smartbox incorporates the Nordic nRF52840 low power SoC to provide the Bluetooth LE connectivity for local inventory tracking via a smartphone. Through the app, users can locate and navigate to specific Smartbox devices in a large warehouse or production facility. According to QuarterPoint, each Smartbox within a Bluetooth LE range of 500 meters can provide an active update of its location and key product metrics to the smartphone app.

An industry leader in low power products

“The Nordic nRF9151 SiP provides secure, bidirectional communication with our backend and it is a critical part of achieving our performance and dynamic device behavior goals,” says Kevin Grimstad, QuarterPoint’s CTO.

“The large memory capacity of the nRF9151 is critical as we push MCUs to their limit to deliver increasingly sophisticated behaviors for our customers.

“Nordic Semiconductor stands out for the industry-leading low power capabilities of its products, the rich set of device peripherals, and the fantastic sales and technical support provided by the company.”

Seedbox Solution, partner and main implementer of QuarterPoint’s technology in the Ag industry, has secured a service contract with a large seed producer to implement the Smartbox on its entire corn box fleet – starting with 10,000 Smartbox devices planned for 2025.