An IoT solution to automate proprietary, agribusiness hardware.

Giving Farmers Up-to-the-Minute Control

For commercial greenhouses, timing, and the precise control of water, light, carbon levels, and soil alkalinity are critical to crop yield. Swarm saw how the Internet of Things (IoT) could automate these tasks, reducing labor while increasing efficiency and profitability.

“BiTE designed a beautifully branded and intuitive sales tool that was exactly what our users and administrators needed.”

Lee Ames
Senior Director Product Marketing

Their vision was a centralized, efficient, and easy-to-use system that controlled all of Swarm’s proprietary CO2 detectors, venting systems, temperature sensors, and light and moisture controllers from one intuitive app. Each of these IoT products performed its precise job requiring device-specific functionality. Although a light sensor and a CO2 detector may be radically different in configuration, they all needed to communicate efficiently and seamlessly with the server to offer commercial farmers up-to-the-minute data and control of their greenhouses from anywhere.

Augmentation

Originally, BiTE was tasked to build Swarm’s iOS app, while Swarm’s internal team built the backend. However, after the second sprint, they ran into a host of technical and resource management related issues. The job was just too big for them to maintain a steady pace. So, they turned to BiTE for additional help. Our developers quickly integrated with Swarm’s internal team to provide the additional technical expertise and manpower needed to keep pace with development.

Experience and Flexibility

With BiTE developing the API and the iOS app simultaneously, we had to work with Swarm’s internal teams to not only develop the APIs but be flexible enough to adapt the concurrent mobile code to a host of backend changes.

We seamlessly integrated a host of proprietary hardware devices with Swarm’s back-end and the iOS app. The result was a fully automated, commercial farming IoT solution that reduced labor and risk while increasing crop yield and profitability for the greenhouse farmers.