Smart Shepherd

SmartShepherd has had a few homes in the last 5 years: working out of my study, out of the HAX office in Shenzhen, at the University of New England SMART Region Incubator and then Covid happened. The incubator decided to ramp down on-campus access so all the equipment ended up...back at my house. Change of business model - change of facilities Since 2018, SmartShepherd has concentrated largely on supporting key service providers in Australia and New Zealand ( Sheepmatters and SmartShepherd NZ respectively), this has meant the equipment has moved to a use-case that I didn't anticipate - a lot more usage than we budgeted for in any one season. As a result, the devices often come back to home base to be refurbished. This activity is like any other factory work, sometimes it's smelly, involves soldering or glue and generally involves more work space than we had available back at "The Swamp" (our home). The SMART Region Incubator did offer us space at their new N...

SmartShepherd being used in the US Here is Jake Thorne of Texas A&M University describing how they use SmartShepherd in their breeding systems.

As the old song goes, I've been everywhere man . Or at least it seems that way. Here are some random photos from my phone history with something of a background to each one. Warning: image heavy and long-winded. Also in no particular order. In between the photos was a lot of hard work, software development on the road, collaring animals, meeting people, talking about sheep. Getting SmartShepherd off the ground was a whirlwind. Google Maps timeline Shenzhen, Hong Kong, San Francisco (I think the LA dot was me sleeping in the airport), a large chunk of New Zealand and all the sheep parts of Australia. Except for Cairns where there are no sheep, but there was a startup competition. Griffith, NSW: A Fairey Firefly On the way to an event in Hay, NSW. The closest airport to Hay is Griffith. Ordinarily I would drive down there although from my home base in Armidale it's 920km. So I flew once and regretted it largely due to the cost and the hassle of taking equipmen...