CellSense™ – A World's First...
Where to from here?
CellSense™ is a first generation, stand alone device that has been designed by Sensortec specifically to meet the requirements of New Zealand's pasture-based dairy industry, which has relatively low levels of milking automation. Development work continues to devise further versions of this sensor technology to meet the requirements of other global markets with higher levels of milking automation
With CellSense™ and three other products now on the market, Sensortec has expanded to 12 research and development staff with another 5 employed on the manufacturing side of its business.
In order to improve the uptake of its growing range of on-line sensor technologies Sensortec has recently developed a new communications protocol which it has branded MilkCANTM.
This new system has been primarily designed to make the integration of its range of sensors both easier and less expensive for milking systems suppliers and systems integrators. This increases the potential to provide cost effective herd management information to farmers and so expands their market potential.
Until now integration of on-line sensors has been a time consuming and expensive business, requiring milking system suppliers to integrate each sensor application individually. The new MilkCAN™ system means that a single gateway can now be set up that is capable of passing data between the network of MilkCAN™ enabled sensors and the milking system's own process control system.
MilkCAN™ is based on the CAN (Controlled Area Network) bus communications network standard, which was originally developed for the automotive trade. It's now commonly used in a number of process control applications and Sensortec has adapted it to suit the specific requirements of the dairy farm environment.
"This gives MilkCAN™ the potential to become an open communications protocol that could make 'plug and play' sensor technologies a reality on the dairy farm," says Rod.
