My friend wants to start breeding hens. He asked me if I know a solution to remotely open and close a chicken coop door. I replied that is a pretty simple solution - a single GSM-connected device with a door actuator. I would love to explain how to build, program, and connect it to AWS, but I knew that he don’t really care about technical details.
Then he replied:
“I just need to remember to send an SMS to remotely open and close those doors every day.”
That was the moment of inspiration for me! He wanted to build a technical solution to solve a specific business problem, but in the reality just exchanged one problem with the other (a manual task of sending SMS twice a day, every day).
I saw the same behavior multiple times when a business owner introduce IoT to increase efficiency but is not able to properly define the business outcome. Without knowing anything about hens I was able to immediately realize the issue - the technological solution would increase complexity without any real business gain.
Since I really like that person (and I enjoy designing IoT solutions), I suggested some improvements to his idea:
- You do not have to send that SMS yourself, we can create a scheduled task on the chicken coop door controller to open and close automatically.
- We can use the dawn and dusk sensor to open/close the chicken coop door without scheduling fixed hours so you do not have to remember to change the configuration a few times during the year.
- How would you know that all hens are inside before closing those doors? We could use an inside camera and some AI model to count the number of hens and close doors only when all of them are inside.
- You could get an SMS notification when a hen is missing and the chicken coop door should be closed for 30 minutes.
- The inside camera could count the number of eggs laid by every hen - this might indicate health issues (I have no clue if there is any correlation here).
- We could use some additional sensors to monitor conditions inside the chicken coop (temperature, humidity, whatever is important) to improve conditions and avoid health issues.
My list went on and on… Since I consciously avoided the technical details and focused on the business outcomes, my friend keep interested and even started adding his ideas to this list.
That is a real-file example. Probably he won’t implement most of those features as it makes little sense for six hens ;) But his awareness of possibilities could lead to some interesting concepts in the future.
I am working on a series of IoT training and will use an “automated hen farm” as a sample use case. I plan to implement many ideas from the list above in a virtual environment so my students can learn various services and designs.
Out of curiosity: What was the most memorable moment of inspiration for you?
