The way humanity produces food has changed significantly over time. A growing population and rapidly increasing food demand has led to the introduction of dynamic farming technologies. This has resulted in the use of advanced hardware and digital tools to facilitate mechanized crop and livestock production. Sophisticated equipment is employed in modern agriculture and animal farms to perform a variety of tasks. These include pollution control, health maintenance of livestock and crops, biodiversity promotion, the planning and execution of agricultural operations, and monitoring irrigation, among many others. A single farm management system running dedicated farm software and hardware is the best way to enable remote monitoring as well as maximizing production output.
Using a well-established data management system is key to efficient planning and execution of farm operations. Control functions are usually done by dedicated farm software installed on single data servers in this type of system. The server needs to connect to farm devices to gather the required information. Serial ports connect various equipment like electronic feeders, irrigation systems and climate devices to the server enabling the farm management software to collect and analyze the data regarding the equipments’ condition and performance. In many cases the farm machines and hardware that need to be monitored are located remotely and require network connectivity to be accessed. The main data server and any other equipment are all connected to a single network. This does not guarantee communication between the devices and the server. To access all of the remote farm equipment simultaneously, the farm management software needs the support of dedicated port virtualization technology to allow the redirection of any serial or USB port remotely over the network.
Eltima Port Virtualization Technology (EPVT) is a valuable solution that can easily be integrated with farm equipment management systems. USB and serial devices can be virtualized and redirected across the network with the help of EPVT. This enables a single data center to connect to all of the organization’s equipment over a LAN or the Internet. The devices can be accessed as if they were attached physically to the monitoring server. Eltima Port Redirection Technology is engineered to supply any system with limitless virtual COM interfaces. All of the virtual ports emulate the behavior and parameters of physical serial ports.
This port forwarding technology can be integrated into the operating system of farm equipment or farm management systems. Eltima Software also offers a custom development option where you can have their specialists tailor the serial port virtualization technology into a system designed to your specifications.
By integrating EPVT into farm software, manufacturers and developers of farm management systems get the following benefits:
- Enables the creation of a fully-functioning system for the management of a farm system of any size and complexity, sending its data to a single database for centralized control..
- New market segments can be opened up as qualitative improvements to the end products are made.
- Providing users with more efficient and productive solutions for managing their farm operations can gain your company a competitive advantage.