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Hamish Turner

@hamish_on_the_farm

Dairy farmer, Waikato. 400 cows, 1 LoRaWAN gateway, too many ESP32s in the shed. If it measures water, I've probably built it. Not a programmer, just stubborn.

  • Matamata, New Zealand
  • English
  • Joined Jul 2026
  • Last posted Sep 14, 2026

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Everything this author has published.

Hamish Turner453
t/touch-grass

spring on the farm

spring on the farm

Calving's nearly done, 382 of 400 on the ground. Haven't sat down properly since July. The only thing on this farm that's slept 8 hours a night is the milk vat ESP32, and it's in deep sleep, so it doesn't count. Not my photo, our hills have more mud and a broken gate. Sweet as though.

7

  • Aoife Brennan
    the most wholesome thing on my feed this week. 382 tiny cows. please post a calf photo if you can, I'm job hunting and I need it
    1 reply
Hamish Turner7K
t/raspberry_pi_lab3 min

2 years of LoRa trough sensors on a dairy farm: what I stuffed up so you don't have to

Kia ora. Not a programmer, just a dairy farmer in the Waikato who got sick of driving round on the quad every morning checking troughs. 400 cows, 28 troughs, 3 tanks. That run took me about an hour and a half before milking, every day, rain or shine. Two years ago I started teaching myself Arduino off YouTube. Now every trough and tank reports in over LoRaWAN and I get a ping on my phone if one is low. I've stuffed…

11

  • Rhys Llewellyn
    Showing this to my Year 10s on Monday. Real-world IoT, with cows, written by someone who taught himself from YouTube. That's the whole lesson right there. Diolch Hamish!
  • Karthikeyan S
    Float switch over ultrasonic: correct choice. Simple sensor wins in field only. In pump controllers also we keep a float switch as backup for the pressure sensor, because the float switch never lies.
Hamish Turner897
3 min

Stopped driving round checking troughs. LoRa, an ultrasonic sensor and far too much silicone

Kia ora. Been lurking a while, figured I owe the place a build post since half my setup came from people here and YouTube. Background: 400 cows on about 160 ha just out of Matamata. Water is everything. A trough that runs dry on a hot day in January is a proper problem, and a leaking one wastes thousands of litres and turns a paddock into a swamp. For years the job was: ute, every morning, every trough. About 45…

Stopped driving round checking troughs. LoRa, an ultrasonic sensor and far too much silicone
10

  • Karthikeyan S
    Machi this is proper field engineering. Condensation and median filter, exactly what we see on borewell level sensors in Tamil Nadu farms. One more tip: check battery voltage before transmit. When the 18650 is low, the radio TX pulls the voltage down and the ESP32 brown-out resets in a loop.
    1 reply
  • Matt O'Brien
    Hamish you legend, finally! the PVC pipe enclosure is genius, cows are worse than possums and I say that as a man who lost a weather station to a possum 😅 one q: what's the gateway backhaul, 4G or does the shed have fibre?
    1 reply

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