KhuselaGuard: a connected platform, built from the ground up.
Livestock tracking for farms with no mains power and patchy signal. CED designed every layer — tag electronics, firmware, the field relay, the cloud and the apps — and proved it on a working herd.
The challenge
For Eastern Cape farmers, a missing animal is lost income — and by the time it is noticed, recovery is usually slow and rarely works.
The farms that most need tracking are also the hardest places to put technology: no mains power where the animals graze, patchy mobile signal, dust, heat and long distances. A tracker that needs daily charging or full signal doesn’t survive there.
The approach
CED treated KhuselaGuard as one system rather than a gadget. The same team designed the tag electronics and enclosure, wrote the firmware, built the relay that moves data off the farm, the cloud service that receives it, and the apps farmers and administrators use.
Designing the layers together meant decisions could be made where they mattered most — for example, relaying data between tags to a base station, instead of asking every tag to find signal on its own.
The technology
- Hardware — Solar-powered collar tags with positioning and movement sensing, in a sealed enclosure designed in-house.
- Firmware — Low-power embedded firmware that keeps tags running off-grid, with no wiring and no daily charging.
- Field network — Tags pass their data peer-to-peer to a field base station, which carries it on to the cloud.
- Cloud — Receives telemetry, checks positions against the farm’s perimeter and zones, and raises alerts as they happen.
- Apps — A mobile app for alerts and the live herd map, and the KhuselaGuard Console for setting up farms, perimeters and zones.
- Field deployment — Run live on a working herd at Golden Grove Farm on 20 June 2026.
In the press
The outcome
At its first public field demonstration, hosted by Thembani Jwambi at Golden Grove Farm, KhuselaGuard tracked a working herd live, held the farm’s perimeter and three operational zones — grazing, water access and a high-risk roadside boundary — and relayed data from the collars to the cloud under ordinary field conditions.
The farm was set up beforehand in the Console: the perimeter drawn, zones marked and a 4.5 km roam range set. The collars ran on solar power through the day.
Since the demonstration
KhuselaGuard is now sold to paying farm customers. JookJoint Farm purchased five devices in September 2026.
Tags run three to five months of normal operation on a single charge.
What’s next (in development)
The next-generation tag moves from a collar to a solar ear tag — a standard two-piece livestock tag applied with the applicator farmers already own. It is in development.
The engineering
- Power — A device that can’t be charged daily has to budget its energy: when to sense, when to transmit and when to sleep.
- Coverage — Farms are where signal is weakest, so the network design mattered as much as the device itself.
- Trustworthy alerts — An alert is only believable when hardware, firmware, network and cloud agree on what happened.
- Iteration — The tag went through six board revisions, and several packaging and enclosure iterations, before the version that went into the field.
Services used
- Connected technology & IoT — Connecting hardware to software: GPS tracking, remote monitoring and live dashboards.
- Engineering & product development — Electronics, PCB prototypes, firmware and enclosures — from a sketch to a working prototype.
- Custom software & web apps — Business systems, portals, dashboards and the APIs that connect them.