New Team
Orientation
The world of grain storage — and the hardware,
firmware and software that protect it.
Today's journey
The world of grain
Why grain storage matters, what threatens stored grain, and how aeration protects it. This is the 'why' behind everything we build.
How LIRA works
We follow a single sensor reading from deep inside a silo to an operator's screen — and meet the three layers that carry it: hardware, firmware and software.
Finding your place
Which layer might suit you, what you would learn in each, and what to do after today to keep exploring.
Harvested in weeks.
Eaten all year.
Maize, wheat, soybeans, sunflower — staple grains come off the land during a few short weeks, yet people and animals eat them every day of the year. Storage is the bridge between harvest and consumption. While grain sits in a silo waiting for the right moment to sell, it is a massive concentration of value — and it is at risk every single day.
The most important idea in this industry: grain is alive
Every kernel is a living seed. It breathes — scientists call it respiration — consuming oxygen and giving off heat, moisture and CO2. Insects and moulds living among the kernels do exactly the same, only faster.
Cool and dry, this activity is so slow that grain keeps for years. Warm and damp, it accelerates dramatically — and respiration itself produces warmth and moisture.
Go deeper
Once a pocket of grain starts to heat up, it feeds its own fire. A small warm, damp spot becomes a hot spot, the hot spot spreads, mould takes hold — and within weeks a section of the silo can be ruined.
Why problems stay hidden
Grain is an excellent insulator
A hot spot deep inside a silo cannot be felt, seen or smelled from outside. By the time trouble reaches the surface, serious damage has usually already been done.
Moisture migration
Temperature differences between the warm core and cold walls set up slow air currents inside the grain mass. They carry moisture upward and deposit it near the top surface — exactly the damp conditions mould loves.
Aeration — the main weapon
Slows respiration, insects and mould — the colder the grain, the slower every threat moves.
Removes the warm-core / cold-wall differences that drive moisture migration.
With the right air, gently dries the grain or holds it at a target moisture level.
Go deeper · EMC
Grain constantly exchanges moisture with the air around it until the two reach a balance — the equilibrium moisture content (EMC). Whether a given hour of fan running helps or harms depends on the temperature and humidity of the outside air at that moment, compared to the condition of the grain. Fans are also large electric motors — running them at the wrong time wastes money and can damage the grain.
LIRA: from guesswork to measurement
An operator decided when to run fans on experience, gut feel and what the weather looked like that morning.
Sensors in and around every silo continuously measure grain temperature, humidity, CO2 and weather. The cloud platform calculates the grain's condition, warns operators the moment something looks wrong, and switches fans automatically — only when the outside air will genuinely improve the grain.
Grain stays in condition
Millions of rand of stock protected around the clock.
No wasted electricity
Fans run only when running them actually helps.
A complete record
Early warnings instead of nasty surprises — and a full history of how the grain was cared for, for insurance, audits and buyers.
Quick check — no marks, just instinct
The journey of a single reading
Deep inside the grain, a sensor reads 28 °C. Follow it. (→ steps through the journey)
Sensed
A sensor on a temperature cable deep inside the grain reads 28 °C.
Three layers — think of a human body
The body and sense organs
Everything you can touch: circuit boards, sensors, radios, batteries, enclosures. It feels what is happening in the grain.
The reflexes and nervous system
Software living on the devices in the field. It reads the senses, reacts instantly, and relays everything onward — unattended, for months.
The conscious brain and memory
The cloud platform. It remembers everything, thinks about what the readings mean, makes decisions and talks to the humans.
The team is organised the same way — the next three beats take one layer each.
Hardware — what stands at a silo site
Hang inside the grain with sensors along their length — up to 10 per silo. The system's fingertips.
Measure temperature, humidity, CO2 and pressure of the air entering the grain and sitting above it.
Outside temperature, humidity, wind and rain — the whole aeration decision hinges on this.
Small battery-powered board at the fan. Reads nearby sensors and switches the fan through a relay.
The site gateway: a Raspberry Pi with a cellular modem, LoRa radio and battery power.
Enclosures, batteries and charging picked to survive heat, dust, storms and patchy power on a farm.
Go deeper · how boards are designed
The circuit designs are drawn in a professional design program called Altium, and the design files, component lists and datasheets all live in the hardware repository. Boards go through numbered revisions as they improve — you will see folders like 'Rev 3' in the files.
Firmware — the software living in the field
Deliberately simple: wake up, read the sensors wired to it, transmit the raw numbers by radio, switch the fan relay when told to, go back to sleep. No thinking of its own — that is what makes the battery last months.
The on-site brain: polls every Edge Controller over radio, reads the temperature cables directly, converts raw numbers into real values, and publishes everything to the cloud. Also serves a local web page technicians use to pair and set up devices on-site.
Long-range radio that sends small messages over kilometres using almost no battery.
A lightweight messaging protocol built for machines on unreliable connections — small messages published to a cloud broker over a 4G SIM.
Devices update over-the-air — a bug fix doesn't require someone to drive to every farm.
Software — the cloud platform customers see
A web application, hosted on AWS in Cape Town, that operators log into from any browser.
What users see in the browser: dashboards, silo visuals, charts, alerts, reports. React / Next.js, TypeScript.
The engine room: receives sensor data from every site, runs the grain-science calculations, decides when to alert. Express, TypeScript.
PostgreSQL — every reading, alert, fan run and user, kept safely for years. History is what makes trends visible.
Go deeper · platform behaviours
Live updates. When a new reading arrives, open dashboards update within seconds — no refreshing.
Derived values. Some things can't be measured directly: grain moisture is calculated (as EMC) from temperature and humidity; the platform also estimates how full each silo is.
Alerts with judgement. Back-off logic ensures one problem doesn't generate fifty messages.
Multi-tenant. Many customer companies share the platform, but each only ever sees its own silos — isolation enforced at the database level.
No layer works alone
If a sensor drifts…
…the software's clever calculations are built on sand. Hardware quality is the foundation of everything.
If the cellular link drops…
…the dashboard goes blind. Firmware must survive bad networks, storms and power dips without a human nearby.
If the software misjudges the weather…
…perfectly good hardware runs the fans at exactly the wrong time, and the grain pays for it.
The people who thrive in this business understand their own layer deeply — and always keep the other two in view.
You are the grain. Well — you're in charge of it.
Quick check — the journey and the layers
Which layer pulled you in?
Six quick choices. Go with instinct — there are no wrong answers, and this isn't binding. It's a compass, not a contract.
Four things to do after today
Sit with someone who knows it, with the 'journey of a reading' in mind.
Seeing a silo, a temperature cable and a Bin Controller makes it all concrete.
The orientation document and Technical Handover live in the project folder. Feel, don't memorise.
Nothing in this business is too obvious to ask about.
There is also room for people who sit across the layers: testing, field installation and support, documentation, and customer training all matter enormously.
Welcome to
the team.
Grain is alive. Two numbers decide its fate.
You now know how we watch them.
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