Internet of Things based Wireless Plant Sensor for Smart Farming

Abstract

About 10% of the world’s workforce is directly dependent on agriculture for income and about 99% of food consumed by humans comes from farming. Agriculture is highly climate dependent and with global warming and rapidly changing weather it has become necessary to closely monitor the environment of growing crops for maximizing output as well as increasing food security while minimizing resource usage. In this study, we developed a low cost system which will monitor the temperature, humidity, light intensity and soil moisture of crops and send it to an online server for storage and analysis, based on this data the system can control actuators to control the growth parameters. The three tier system architecture consists of sensors and actuators on the lower level followed by an 8-bit AVR microcontroller which is used for data acquisition and processing topped by an ESP8266 Wi-Fi module which communicates with the internet server. The system uses relay to control actuators such as pumps to irrigate the fields; online weather data is used to optimize the irrigation cycles. The prototyped system was subject to several tests, the experimental results express the systems reliability and accuracy which accentuate its feasibility in real-world applications.