Demo: Taking Advantage of the Shock Hazard: How to Use an Electric Fence for Data Transfers

The deployment of embedded sensing devices on croplands and pastures is an enabling element for precision agriculture applications. Changing conditions (e.g., different crops being grown), however, may require the occasional reconfiguration of the resulting networks of wireless sensors, e.g., to modify data reporting rates or synchronize internal clocks. In this demo we showcase an opportunistic broadcast channel to forward such configuration messages to embedded systems. The transmitting station is realized by means of an electric fence energizer, a device frequently utilized in agricultural settings. On the receiver side, only little hardware efforts are required to capture the highvoltage pulses and decode transmitted configuration messages.