Niluka Weerasinghe, a student of the Smart Sustainable Solutions programme at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, CZU Prague, spent a month this summer on a traineeship at AgriWatch BV in the Netherlands. The traineeship took place as part of his studies in the Smart Sustainable Solutions programme and under the Erasmus+ ECOLUTION project, with a clear task: to design and build a Vertical Microclimate Sensing Node for early frost detection in blueberry cultivation — a small step towards protecting crops in a changing climate.
It was a hands-on engineering month, most of it under the open sky of a Dutch backyard. Niluka integrated a thermal-imaging camera, an infrared leaf/bud sensor, a vertical air-temperature profile, humidity, RGB and depth cameras and a wind feed onto a single Arduino UNO Q. He also wrote the software behind a live dashboard that isolates the plant, builds a 3-D model of it, computes dew point, vapour-pressure deficit and canopy cooling rate, and flags frost risk in real time. He later added AI leaf/bud/fruit detection and secure remote access.
“I feel especially fortunate to have worked alongside Emeritus Professor Nanno Mulder, whose insights into spectral feature extraction shaped the vision system,” Niluka says.
He stayed the whole month in the beautiful village of Overdinkel, in a warm home shared with two wonderful cats, Twinkle and Dinkel.
A month of learning, Dutch summer and a happy reminder that great products can be born in a backyard. Niluka’s heartfelt thanks go to AgriWatch, Professor Mulder, Dr Ali Abkar and Erasmus+ ECOLUTION.
