Have you ever considered integrating with Datamars Tru-Test? (datamars.com) You might be familiar with the brand, they are a world leader of farming equipment such as electronic identification, electronic scales, electric fences and much more. They have a very well-developed environment for collecting animal data and now they are growing on cloud monitoring for electric fences.
I use their products and their platform. I have already reached them inquiring if they had already opportunity to talk with FarmOS: This was the response. If you will, it would be a pleasure to forward your response to them and maybe start a great collaboration.
Reply from John
Hi RML,
Thanks for getting in contact with us.
We are keen to support 3rd party vendors integrating with our products. If you wish to integrate with request access to Datamars API’s and documentation, please provide more details about your company, including the below.
This will help with ensuring that the correct person is able to assist further and give information to enable swift resolution to your requirements.
1. Country where your business is incorporated?
2. Software / App Name
3. URL:
4. Company name
5. Physical address
6. How large is your customer base approximately
7. How do you describe the markets / regions you will be targeting?
8. Contact Email:
9. Contact Tel:
10. Description of Request:
11. Affected Tru Test Products:
12. What other platforms are you seeking to integrate into your software beyond Tru-Test products?
We look forward to hearing back from you.
Cheers
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Hi @renatomarcio welcome to the farmOS forum!
Generally speaking, the way to go about integrations between farmOS and other third-party systems would be to build a module. This module would not be part of farmOS core, but would be its own standalone project (git repository) that farmOS users could download and install in their farmOS instance if they wanted to. In this way, the burden of maintaining integrations can be spread out among the folks in the community who use them. And farmOS core (and the core maintainers) can focus on the general features and building blocks that enable these integrations. 
Speaking personally as one of the core maintainers, I probably won’t have the capacity to work on this particular integration myself in the near future, but maybe there are others who would be! Or, of course, you can! There is no barrier to entry other than your own motivation. 
Another option, if Datamars saw value in a farmOS integration, would be for them to build and maintain the farmOS+Datamars integration themselves. The benefit of doing this for them include: 1) leveraging all the work that has gone into farmOS as a general purpose record management system so they don’t have to reinvent all the wheels we are focused on, 2) community cred for giving back some software to the public under an open source license (worth noting that only the farmOS module needs to be GPL licensed… but if it talks to their APIs then those can remain proprietary… that is my understanding anyway - I am not a lawyer.)
It sounds like their email assumes that it’s a company requesting integration. farmOS is not a company. It is an open source community software project. Anyone can host it themselves, and the aim is for farmers to have more control over their data and not be beholden to the whims of a software company that can go bankrupt and disappear at any time (and take their data with them). With that as the context, I often like to frame integrations as a way to “archive” data from the third-party into a system that the farmer has control over (farmOS). farmOS isn’t trying to outcompete all the specialized features of software products on the market… we don’t have the budget for that ha! But if we can work together in a way that allows farmers to more easily move data from one place to another, then that’s the goal.
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Great! Thanks for the answer, I will forward to them. The idea was to give the first spark… I have just got started with farmOS. Maybe I am able to grow my knowledge and begin effective contribution at some time…
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I love this type of stuff, but Tru-Test equipment is generally out of my budget. I have a few EID/scales projects in mind and have been working on fence monitors, this is more DIY based stuff though.
What sort of equipment are you thinking about? A first step may be to apply for the API documentation and see what you can do with it.
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