Smart milking device

Bespoke AI-IoT bluetooth device for cow farmers.

Most western cow farms are between 500-1000 cows in size and this kind of scale means farmers can afford all kinds of technology to help them produce higher milk yields. By comparison, the average cow farm in India is around 4 cows and so farmers aren’t able to leverage the same kind of technology as western farmers.

As product designers, this gives us an unbelievable opportunity to design bespoke, low cost tech products for people that the rest of the world has ignored - like this A.I. powered milking device.

Farmers like nice products too! The idea for the enclosure and overall design of this device was to give farmers something beautiful, something that they might not expect from a low cost device and something that would stand-out in market.

I always start projects by rapid protoyping using off-the-shelf electronic components and then combining them on a custom designed PCB. This enables us to make fast interations and test sensor performance quickly, without the costs and timelines attached to creating fully integrated PCB’s.

The best part of designing new products and in my opinion the most important, is that first test with real users. I ask my design teams to do this very early on in every smart product design project and my favourite part is actually iterating and making as many design changes as possible on-site, then testing again. On this occasion that meant updating firmware whilst up to my knees in cow dung!