Farm Island — Coffee Farm¶

The Farm Island represents the origin of the supply chain: a coffee farm. It is the only island with field-level sensor infrastructure, measuring growing conditions and logging harvest batches via ERPNext.

→ Architecture overview | LoRaWAN details | GitOps workflow

Physical Structure¶

The Farm Island is built on an aluminium profile rack with multiple shelf levels, making all components visible and accessible — a deliberate didactic choice.

┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│  TOP LEVEL — Coffee Plant           │
│  ┌───────────────────────────────┐  │
│  │   LED grow light (above)      │  │  ← intensity + schedule controllable
│  │   🌱 Coffee plant in pot      │  │
│  │   LoRaWAN sensors around it   │  │  ← soil moisture, temp, CO₂
│  └───────────────────────────────┘  │
│                                     │
│  MID LEVEL — Water Reservoir        │
│  ┌───────────────────────────────┐  │
│  │   Water tank + pump           │  │
│  │   Shelly relay (irrigation)   │  │  ← moisture-triggered automation
│  └───────────────────────────────┘  │
│                                     │
│  LOWER LEVEL — Compute & Network    │
│  ┌───────────────────────────────┐  │
│  │   ERP workstation (Dell)      │  │
│  │   MikroTik router             │  │
│  │   MikroTik wAP LR8 gateway    │  │
│  └───────────────────────────────┘  │
│                                     │
│  FRONT — Touch display (mounted)    │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

Grow Light¶

An LED grow light is mounted above the coffee plant. Both intensity and on/off schedule are software-controlled (via Node-RED), allowing simulation of different photoperiods and light stress scenarios for didactic use.

Automated Irrigation¶

A small water pump draws from a reservoir on the mid level. A Shelly relay (or equivalent smart relay) switches the pump based on soil-moisture readings from the LoRaWAN sensors. The control logic runs in Node-RED and triggers watering when moisture drops below a configurable threshold.

Touch Display¶

A touch display is mounted on the front of the rack and shows the Grafana sensor dashboard in kiosk mode, giving a live view of plant conditions directly at the island.

Hardware¶

Component	Model / Spec	Function
Linux workstation	Dell, Core i7, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD	Main compute node for all Docker services
Touch display	—	Grafana sensor dashboard in kiosk mode (rack-mounted)
LED grow light	—	Controllable plant lighting (intensity + schedule via Node-RED)
Smart relay	Shelly (tbc)	Switches irrigation pump based on soil-moisture threshold
Water tank + pump	—	Automated moisture-controlled irrigation
LoRaWAN gateway	MikroTik wAP LR8 kit	Receives sensor radio packets, forwards to ChirpStack
Router	MikroTik	DHCP, NTP, routing for all island devices
Sensors	Dragino LHT65, LDDS75 / Seeed SenseCAP S2103	Soil moisture, temperature, CO₂, fill level

Network: The workstation receives a fixed DHCP reservation by MAC address (e.g. 192.168.10.10) so the wAP LR8 packet forwarder always has a stable target IP.

Services (Docker)¶

Service	Port	Function
ChirpStack	8080	LoRaWAN Network Server — authentication, decoding, MQTT output
ChirpStack Gateway Bridge	1700/udp	Translates UDP packets from wAP LR8 to MQTT
Mosquitto	1883	MQTT broker (island-internal)
Node-RED	1880	MQTT → ERPNext + Kafka + Fabric peer integration
Grafana	3000	Sensor dashboard on the touch display
ERPNext	8000	ERP: inventory, batch tracking, quality assurance
Fabric Peer Node	7051	Writes harvest batch events to the shared Fabric ledger
PostgreSQL	internal	Database for ChirpStack
MariaDB	internal	Database for ERPNext

Internal Data Flow¶

LoRaWAN sensors (868 MHz)
    ↓
MikroTik wAP LR8  →  UDP:1700
    ↓
ChirpStack Gateway Bridge  →  MQTT
    ↓
ChirpStack (auth, decode)  →  MQTT (Mosquitto)
    ↓
Node-RED
    ├─→ ERPNext          (REST — inventory & batch bookings)
    ├─→ Kafka            (internal event processing)
    ├─→ Fabric Peer Node (harvest batch event on ledger)
    ├─→ Shelly relay     (irrigation pump ON/OFF — moisture threshold)
    └─→ LED grow light   (intensity + schedule control)

Initial Setup¶

# Clone the repository on the farm workstation
git clone https://github.com/digital-business-lab/digital-supply-chain.git /opt/digital-supply-chain
cd /opt/digital-supply-chain

# Copy and fill in secrets
cp farm-island/.env.example farm-island/.env
nano farm-island/.env

# Run bootstrap (installs Docker, sets up systemd timers, starts services)
chmod +x farm-island/scripts/bootstrap.sh
./farm-island/scripts/bootstrap.sh

Key Scripts¶

Script	Purpose
`scripts/bootstrap.sh`	Initial setup — run once on a fresh workstation
`scripts/deploy.sh`	GitOps deploy: `git pull` + `docker compose up -d`
`scripts/install-deploy-timer.sh`	Installs systemd timer for auto-deploy every 15 min
`scripts/backup.sh`	Full backup to `~/farm-backups/` (databases + volumes)
`scripts/restore.sh`	Restore a backup archive
`scripts/install-backup-timer.sh`	Installs systemd timer for daily 02:00 backup
`scripts/mikrotik-backup.rsc`	RouterOS backup commands for the MikroTik

Folder Structure¶

farm-island/
  docker-compose.yml
  .env.example
  config/
    chirpstack/chirpstack.toml
    chirpstack-gateway-bridge/chirpstack-gateway-bridge.toml
    grafana/provisioning/datasources/
    mosquitto/mosquitto.conf
    postgres/init.sql
  scripts/
    bootstrap.sh
    deploy.sh · install-deploy-timer.sh
    backup.sh · restore.sh · install-backup-timer.sh
    mikrotik-backup.rsc