Smart agriculture
Low power wireless IoT connectivity solutions for smart agriculture
Nordic-powered livestock monitoring collar tag tracks health of grazing
22
Jun
2026
2026
Oslo, Norway
Designed by Nemeus, the collar tag uses LoRaWAN and Bluetooth LE for data transmission, and integrates the nRF52840 SoC to provide multi-year battery life and eliminate the need for a dual processor design
French electronics engineering company, Nemeus, has developed an ultra-low power collar sensor for livestock monitoring, employing Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52840 multiprotocol SoC. Attached around the neck of grazing animals, the collar tag performs sensor-based motion and temperature analysis to detect significant events relevant to the animal’s welfare. Alerts are then wirelessly relayed to the farmer so they can monitor the health and comfort of their herd via a smartphone- or web-based app.
Bluetooth LE short range data transfer
Developed for a client that specializes in agricultural sensing technology, the collar tag relays sensor data over long distances via LoRaWAN, and uses the Bluetooth® LE wireless connectivity of the nRF52840 SoC for short range data transfer – including configuration, firmware updates and status readback directly from a smartphone. The collar tag can provide farmers with valuable information for herd management, including heat cycle detection, calving and feeding data, as well as health and comfort statistics such as lying, standing and resting times.
Nemeus designed the full hardware and firmware of the tag, and supported the end-to-end production process working alongside the electronics manufacturing services (EMS) partner. The company defined the end-of-line test scenarios, and developed the full associated toolchain including test firmware, production test software, barcode scanner integration, and a test server with quality data storage.
“During development the dominant constraint was power consumption,” says Gilles Ronco, President of Nemeus. “The tag has to run on a single primary cell for years, in a wide temperature range, and must sustain peak currents during LoRaWAN transmissions without compromising the overall energy budget. Every design decision—quiescent current, radio duty cycle, sleep strategy—was made through that lens.
“Beyond power, BOM cost and software complexity were equally critical. We needed to consolidate Bluetooth LE and LoRaWAN communication on a single programmable MCU. Having two separate chips, one running a Bluetooth LE stack and another running the application and LoRaWAN stack, would have increased BOM cost, added inter-processor communication overhead, and significantly complicated firmware management, especially for dual-MCU OTA updates requiring larger Flash storage.”
Compared to other chip companies, Nordic stands out on two essential points: the quality of their products, and the quality of their support
Gilles Ronco, President of Nemeus
Reduced power consumption and BOM
To meet its power consumption objectives and reduce BOM costs and software complexity, Nemeus selected the nRF52840 SoC. The design targets a multi-year battery life on a single primary cell, and the nRF52840 SoC’s integrated DC/DC converter, aggressive sleep modes, and overall power architecture were ideal for the device’s quiescent-dominated power budget with periodic high-current LoRa TX bursts.
The Nordic SoC also runs the Bluetooth LE protocol and application logic, with an external LoRa transceiver handling the sub-GHz RF. According to Nemeus, moving from a dual-MCU design to a single nRF52840 SoC eliminated the need for an inter-processor communication bus, removed redundant crystals, reduced both PCB complexity and Flash memory requirements, and simplified the entire firmware build and update chain.
In addition to the simpler architecture, the Nordic SoC enabled field firmware updates at scale using Nemeus’ proprietary Bluetooth LE DFU propagation system. This system allows the farmer to update a single tag on a single animal from their smartphone over Bluetooth LE, that then propagates the firmware to other tags over Bluetooth LE. Multiple updated tags can act as sources simultaneously, accelerating propagation, and allowing an entire herd’s devices to be updated in minutes to hours, depending on the size of the farm. The propagation mechanism is built on top of Zephyr's standard DFU stack, extended with Nemeus’ ultra-low-power advertising and scanning logic so propagation has negligible impact on battery life.
“Compared to other chip companies, Nordic stands out on two essential points: the quality of their products, and the quality of their support,” continues Ronco. “Their engineers are directly accessible when needed, which is rare at this scale and builds a lasting relationship of trust.
“The customer had aggressive schedule requirements, and this project became one of the fastest we have taken from development to mass production. Choosing a chip we knew deeply was a risk management decision as much as a technical one. The nRF52840, combined with our existing Nemeus codebase on the nRF Connect SDK and Zephyr, gave us confidence we could deliver.”
