How to set up an animated heatmap

We’ve said it before, our roadmap is simple: our customers are experts in agriculture, and we make what they need. This goes for our sensor portfolio, a network that’s reliable in industrial conditions (9 months in a cold storage container with perfect uptime level reliable) and ZENSIE, our data and analytics platform.

Our sensors, if we do say so, are a perfect fit for agricultural needs (we know because we’ve sourced them that way). They’re rugged and built to survive the elements, they’re wireless and easily placed in any location, and with metrics like Vapour Pressure Deficit (VPD), dewpoint, soil moisture and crop-level object temperature (just to name a few), they’re helping answer growers’ most pressing questions about their crops and growing environment. But we know that sensors are only as good as the data they can provide— and that’s where ZENSIE comes in.

We’ve made ZENSIE dashboards buildable in minutes for the same reason we’ve made sensors deployable in minutes— growers don’t have time to waste on tech setup and interfaces. Technology should be a seamless tool that helps growers do what they do best, using the data at their disposal to constantly experiment with and optimise how they manage their crops. And we know from our customers that tangible, practical visualizations are central to making the most of sensor data.

“The heat map gives very interesting insights. For example, you immediately see the impact of uninsulated transport pipes on the climate of your greenhouse.” Eef Zwinkels – Technical Account Manager Royal Brinkman

ZENSIE is widget-based to give each user the option to set up a personal dashboard that displays exactly the information they need, exactly how they want to see it. We added the heatmap widget based on customer input: growers wanted a tangible overview of their value distributions, so we made sure they could see them displayed over the chart, map or photo of their choice. And now we’ve upped the ante.

Heatmap animations, give 30MHz customers a bird’s eye view of the changes in these value distributions, helping identifying new trends, tendencies and relationships between values over a given period of time. Growers can now, for example, observe changes in temperature, VPD and dewpoint over the course of a day, and see the sun’s impact on these readings in their facilities. Just another feature we’ve added based on customer demand. See it in action below:

Any questions about smart sensing for agriculture? Get in touch, we’re here to help.