Autonomous, off-grid sensing for intelligent landscapes and distributed field monitoring.
Status: Working prototype available
Seeking funding and collaboration
Seeking pilot deployments and strategic collaboration.
EtherSense high level architecture
EtherSense is Etherwave’s autonomous sensing platform designed for distributed and off-grid environments. It combines solar-powered sensing nodes (EtherField), a compact gateway (EtherHub), long-range low-power communication, and a cloud-based monitoring platform.
Unlike traditional IoT solutions that depend on direct cellular connectivity at each sensor, EtherSense enables field units to communicate with the hub even outside 4G/5G coverage, allowing scalable sensing deployments in remote or infrastructure-limited areas.
Why this matters
Many real-world environments still lack affordable, scalable, and continuously connected sensing infrastructure. In several domains such as agriculture, forests, and other remote scenarios, sensors need to operate in areas where cellular coverage is limited, unreliable, or entirely absent. Moreover, even where cellular coverage exists, relying on direct connectivity for each sensing device leads to increased costs, higher power consumption, and reduced deployment flexibility.
This creates major constraints:
- Sensors cannot be deployed where they are most needed
- Connectivity costs scale poorly with large deployments
- Battery life is significantly reduced due to cellular usage
- Maintenance and operational complexity increase
- Coverage gaps lead to incomplete or unreliable data
EtherSense addresses these challenges through a hierarchical and off-grid sensing architecture, where low-power field units (EtherField-X) communicate with a hub (Etherhub25) over LoRa wireless links (typically up to 10+ km depending on conditions), and only the hub requires wide-area connectivity.
EtherSense is intended for distributed real-world deployments in which multiple field nodes communicate through a compact gateway and expose data to a cloud platform for monitoring, diagnostics, and analytics. This architecture supports large-area sensing while keeping field installations lightweight and low-power.
EtherSense Components
- EtherHub25 as a rugged, solar-powered aggregation hub with LoRa, GPS, and CAT-M / RedCap backhaul
- EtherField25 as modular low-power field nodes with sensor interfacing and GPS
- Cloud and GUI platform for dashboards, map-based monitoring, diagnostics, alerts, and analytics
Prototype EtherHub25 unit
EtherSense Dashboard GUI
EtherSense Flavors
The EtherSense platform is quite versatile, enabling a suite of sensing solutions. We currently investigate four variants, intended to capture data across diverse environments — from infrastructure monitoring to environmental intelligence.
EtherSense-A
Supports irrigation optimization and field awareness through soil-related sensing, helping reduce water use, improve crop quality, lower local inspection effort, and enable more responsive decision-making.
EtherSense-W
Enables denser local weather monitoring than traditional sparse station deployments, improving visibility of microclimates, local gradients, and geographically specific weather behaviour.
EtherSense-F
Adds a ground-level sensing layer to complement camera-based wildfire systems, improving anomaly detection and alert confidence in areas where line-of-sight is limited.
EtherSense-T
Provides real-time visibility into LV transformer condition through temperature, vibration, and ambient monitoring, aiming to detect deterioration early and reduce outage and wildfire risk.
Competitive Advantages
- Low CAPEX and OPEX
- Fully solar-powered and autonomous operation
- Plug-and-sense deployment model
- Cloud intelligence and diagnostics
- Rugged industrial-grade approach
- End-to-end ownership across hardware, firmware, connectivity, and cloud stack
Current Directions
EtherSense has reached a working prototype stage, with the core platform architecture validated across hardware, connectivity, and cloud components. Current efforts focus on refining the system through real-world deployments and adapting it to specific application domains.
We are actively seeking collaboration with:
- Pilot customers interested in deploying EtherSense in operational environments
- Research and innovation partners for joint development and validation
- Funding and investment partners to support further productisation and scaling
Our goal is to evolve EtherSense into a robust, field-proven solution through close engagement with stakeholders and early adopters.
