A good six years ago one of our earliest prototypes (SD-003) came back dead and completely wet inside. Since then I’ve always said “Never trust an agtech device you can’t dunk in water”.
The RM1 could do it and now the new RM2 enclosure has shown it can also be submerged for up to 30 minutes at 1 metre depth – that’s the ingress protection level we shoot for (IP67).
It’s not that the RM1 or RM2 are underwater devices – don’t be doing that! It’s that out in the field there are rain events as high as 80mm in the space of an hour or two that effectively create the same conditions as drowning the device. We need to be able to handle Australian weather conditions.
There is something poetic about testing our enclosure in a City of Greater Geelong green organics bin, the very place this whole project started.