Low-Cost LoRaWAN Node for Agro-Intelligence IoT

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I found it a very interesting article on engineering, although not as an article and research as such.

Otherwise it is a very interesting article on the internet of things applied to agriculture.

Maybe they should have expanded the related work a bit, although it is not strictly necessary.

The document is very well structured and well developed. It is very easy to read and understand.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is well written and the content is important for practitioners in the area of precision or decision agriculture. However, it does not comply very well to scientific standards and the selection of the main components (LoRaWAN and SDI-12) is not clear and not systematically driven. More concretely:

• Please make the abstract less technical. The exact definitions of the sensors are not needed, but what they do. Also, the SDI-12 protocol has not been introduced yet. Same for TTN (even if most people with LoRa experience know it) and ThinkSpeak. It would be better to cut down those references to names and to make a more general and qualitative description at this point.
• I have to admit that I see the SDI-12 protocol for the first time, even if I am obviously working in the same field as you :-) Please make a proper introduction to it and what are its advantages/disadvantages and why do you want to use it at all.
• Your related works sound limited. It looks like you wanted to have a LoRaWAN based sensor node with SDI-12 sensors form the very beginning. However, in a scientific paper you need first to systematically explore what is available and only then take such a decision (and of course motivate it). There are many more solutions for agriculture, e.g. based on WiFi or an other 434MHz solutions. A quick search on Google:
  • https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3143337.3143338
  • https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7856149
  • https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8990756?casa_token=Qk8aeKu8UO0AAAAA:JfQJ8_gYIANKcDaUZ8Ehc1aZYAYAeqSj2bNWJSuuYY366p0rw2rrFxCQIdODbMMW1Um7LGjSSYA
•  Please check the copyright rules for the pictures you use and note them in the respective figures.
• It will be favorable to publish your hardware design under an open hardware license.
• I do not see the purpose of Table 2.
• The discussion of the entire system in Fig 14 should be moved to another section, before Results.
• Fig 16, the air temperature is misspelled.
• Fig 17: what happens shortly before 14-04? 
• The results section needs some structure and order. Please organize it either into different metrics (temperature, wind, soil moisture, etc.) or something else, but do not put everything together.
• The tweet is unnecessary in this context.
• power consumption: please put the different current consumption of all states in a table. Equations 2 and 3 are sufficient, with the new table everybody should be able to calculate Equation 4. 
• It would be better to experimentally confirm the power consumption of the sensor node.
• Given the solar panel and the available batteries on board, what is the expected lifetime of the node?
• Node cost: what about your sensors? Otherwise, the comparison with SenSecap does not hold.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf