Certain insects affect cultivations in a detrimental way. A notable case is the olive fruit fly (Bactrocera oleae (Rossi)), that in Europe alone causes billions of euros in crop-loss/per year. Pests can be controlled with aerial and ground bait pesticide sprays, the efficiency of which depends on knowing the time and location of insect infestations as early as possible. The inspection of traps is currently carried out manually. Automatic monitoring traps can enhance efficient monitoring of flying pests by identifying and counting targeted pests as they enter the trap. This work deals with the hardware setup of an insect trap with an embedded optoelectronic sensor that automatically records insects as they fly in the trap. The sensor responsible for detecting the insect is an array of phototransistors receiving light from an infrared LED. The wing-beat recording is based on the interruption of the emitted light due to the partial occlusion from insect’s wings as they fly in the trap. We show that the recordings are of high quality paving the way for automatic recognition and transmission of insect detections from the field to a smartphone. This work emphasizes the hardware implementation of the sensor and the detection/counting module giving all necessary implementation details needed to construct it.

Massive advancements in computing and communication technologies have enabled the ubiquitous presence of interconnected computing devices in all aspects of modern life, forming what is typically referred to as the “Internet of Things”. These major changes could not leave the industrial environment unaffected, with “smart” industrial deployments gradually becoming a reality; a trend that is often referred to as the 4th industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. Nevertheless, the direct interaction of the smart devices with the physical world and their resource constraints, along with the strict performance, security, and reliability requirements of industrial infrastructures, necessitate the adoption of lightweight as well as secure communication mechanisms. Motivated by the above, this paper highlights the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) as a lightweight protocol suitable for the industrial domain, presenting a comprehensive evaluation of different security mechanisms that could be used to protect the MQTT-enabled interactions on a real testbed of wireless sensor motes. Moreover, the applicability of the proposed solutions is assessed in the context of a real industrial application, analyzing the network characteristics and requirements of an actual, operating wind park, as a representative use case of industrial networks.