ABSTRACT:
Farming is a major input sector for economic development of any country. Livelihood of majority of population of the country like India depends on agriculture. In this project, it is proposed to develop a Smart Farming System that uses advantages of cutting edge technologies such as IoT, Wireless Sensor Network and Cloud computing to help farmers enhance the way farming is done.
Using sensors like temperature, humidity, moisture etc. are used to get information about the field and help farmers to take precise decisions on insights and recommendations based on the collected data.
BLOCK DIAGRAM
Block Diagram.
SYSTEM DESIGN
Architecture of the system consists of hardware different sensors like temperature, humidity, moisture and Atmega 328 micro controller, battery, RTC module, RF module NRF24L01, and Wi-Fi module. Micro controller controls all the activities taking place on board.
Sensors sense all the physical parameters and convert the analogue value to digital value. Temperature and humidity sensors are used to measure the temperature and humidity respectively on field.
Soil Moisture Sensor are of capacitive type, and are used to measure the moisture of the soil. Wind speed is also determined as it affects the amount of water required by crops. RTC module is used for manipulating the real time data from sensors. This sensed data from the sensors is given to the RF node.
IMPLEMENTATION
IoT based smart farming system is used to generate decisions regarding irrigation using real time data. First of all, farmer logs in to the system using his credentials such as username and password from an Android app. He is then allowed to select the crop for that season. System is implemented in three phases.
- Sensing
- Processing
- Information distribution.
In sensing phase, various sensors like temperature , moisture, humidity are attached to the Arduino Nano board to sense the soil, air and water characteristics of the field. They sense the real time environmental values and transfer it to the gateway using NRF24L01 module.
NRF24L01 module is a single chip 2.4 GHz transceiver which is suitable for low power wireless applications. IoT gateway gathers the data from all the sensors and transfers it to the cloud for further processing. Data received by the cloud can be visualized in many forms like different graphs, histograms, etc.
In the next phase of processing, data on the cloud is processed to generate some useful results. In this system , proper irrigation schedule is generated, which will help farmer in increasing his crop yield. Weather data from the meteorological department also needs to be monitored for planning irrigation schedule. Irrigation is an important step in farming on which growth of crop depends.
CONCLUSION
IoT based smart farming system can prove to be very helpful for farmers since over as well as less irrigation is not good for farming. Threshold values for climatic conditions like humidity, temperature, moisture can be fixed based on the environmental conditions of that particular region.
This system generates irrigation schedule based on the sensed real time data from field and data from the weather repository. This system can recommend farmer whether or not, is there a need for irrigation.
FUTURE SCOPE
One of the limitations of this system is that continuous internet connectivity is required at user end which might prove to be costly for farmer. This can be overcome by extending the system to send suggestion via SMS to the farmer directly on his mobile using GSM module instead of mobile app.
Weather data from the meteorological department can be used along with the sensed data to predict more information about the future which can help farmer plan accordingly and improve his livelihood.
Source: M.I.T. College of Engineering
Authors: Akshay Atole | Apurva Asmar | Amar Biradar | Nikhil Kothawade | Sambhaji Sarode | Rajendra G. Khope
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