2013 International Conference on Computation of Power, Energy, Information and Communication (TCCPEIC) 71

Online Farming Based On Embedded Systems and Wireless Sensor Networks

K.Sathish kannan,G.Thilagavathi

Abstract- The agricultural scenario seems to be one of the most

promising application areas for WSN due to the necessity of

providing the agricultural production chain in terms of precision

and quality. This involves a careful system design, since

requirements are very strict, battery life-time maximization,

robustness, recovery strategies, network flexibility and re­

configurability. This paper implements zigbee based wireless

sensor network in agriculture such as monitoring of

environmental conditions like weather, soil moisture content, soil

temperature, soil fertility, weed detection, water level, monitoring

growth of the crop, precision agriculture, automated irrigation

facility and storage of agricultural products. The aim of this

project is to monitor and maintain the farm from any part of the

world through internet. Monitoring is done with the help of

wireless sensor networks and all the control process is done with

the help of the microcontrollers. Wireless cameras are used to

feed live video of the farm to any part of the world. With the help

of this project, modern technologies and new ideas can be

implemented in the farm sector of our country. A farmer can see

the real condition of his farm and also control his farm from any

part of the world by logging into farming website. This makes the

Indian farmers feel comfortable and reduces the risks involved in

irrigation. The idea has the potential to attract entrepreneurs to

invest in the agricultural sector.

Keywords- Agriculture, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN),

Zigbee, Internet, Website.

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper presents, a means to identify the field parameters using wireless communication. Wireless technology for an intelligent irrigation system has become a popular research with the greenhouse effect. People are taking advantages of the recent development in embedded systems into monitoring and control system for an intelligent irrigation system. For many, the term 'wireless' is daunting since it brings forth a whole lexicon of additional terms and acronyms such as WiFi, ZigBee, RFID, WLAN, Bluetooth and 802.11x that are new and intimidating. Monitoring parameters of temperature and humidity is an important means for obtaining high-quality environment. Remote monitoring is an effective method in order to avoid interference environment and improve efficiency. In the proposed system a farm is constructed in a technical method with low cost power saving wireless sensor network and it can be monitored remotely by logging into a farming website.

This website helps the farmer to view the status of the farm such as the temperature, moisture, fertility of the soil and live video of the farm and also makes a social network in between the farmers. By implementing the sensors in the farm, work of the farmers can be reduced and at the same time the productivity can be increased. As the farmers are networked together by a website, many experts idea can be shared and all the doubts of a new inexperienced farmer can be clarified by the experts.

The major problems confronting Indian agriculture are those of population pressure, small holdings, depleted soils, lack of modern technology and poor facilities for storage. D.D.Chaudhary et al[7] reports that the technological development in Wireless Sensor Networks made it possible to use in monitoring and control of greenhouse parameter in precision agriculture. It is observed that farmers have to bear huge financial loss because of wrong prediction of weather and incorrect irrigation method to crops. The evolution in wireless sensor technologies and miniaturized sensor devices, it is possible to uses them for automatic environment monitoring and controlling the parameters of greenhouse, for Precision Agriculture (P A) application. This paper[7] has analyzes and proposes the use of programmable System on Chip Technology (PSoC) as a part of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to monitor and control various parameter of green house.

Yunseop (James) kim et a/[IO] reports that the Efficient water management is a major concern in many cropping systems in semiarid and arid areas. Distributed in-field sensor based irrigation systems offer a potential solution to support site-specific irrigation management that allows producers to maximize their productivity while saving water. An irrigation machine was converted to be electronically controlled by a programming logic controller that updates geo-referenced location of sprinklers from a differential Global Positioning System (GPS) and wirelessly communicates with a computer at the base station. Communication signals from the sensor network and irrigation controller to the base station were successfully interfaced using low-cost Bluetooth wireless radio communication.

Andrew J. Skinneret al[6] has investigated the recent development of wetting-front detectors has provided a low­energy method of collecting transient samples of soil water under irrigation and rainfall conditions. A simple four­electrode conductivity sensor is presented for the automatic logging of soil water salinity extracted from the wetting front

K.Sathish kannan Dept. of Embedded system SairamEngineering college, Chennai, India,sathishkannan60@gmail.com�

during that part of the irrigation cycle when accumulated salts

technologies, Sri in a crop root zone are being mobilized under gravitational Tamilnadu flows. The conductance of the platinum on ceramic cell is

G.Thilagavathi, Dept. of ECE, Sri Sairam Engineering college, Chennai Tamilnadu, India, thilagavathy.ece@sairam.edu.in

measured with an ac square-wave driven by a pair of micro­power operational amplifiers whose rectified ground current acts as the Dc signal proportional to electrical conductivity (EC). A 1 :200 current mirror reflects this signal into a simple charge balance 16-b analog-to-digital converter (ADC) bridge formed by single op-amp acting in conjunction with the

ISBN: 978-1-4673-6408-9113/$31.00©20 13 IEEE

2013 International Conference on Computation of Power, Energy, Information and Communication (TCCPEIC) 72

internal comparator of a low-cost microcontroller. Similarly, the platinum temperature sensor on the conductivity cell forms an integral part of a second 16-b charge balance ADC in conjunction with a 1 rnA current source. No instrumentation amplifier is required. The temperature coefficients of both the saline solution and the sensor circuit are picked up in the calibration process to produce an accurate temperature­corrected EC digital output that can be collected automatically by a data logger via the SDJ-12 environmental data bus.

Claudio Piciarelli et al[ll]reports that the Automatic security-oriented event analysis refers to the automatic detection of anomalous, dangerous, or forbidden events in video streams. Even though researchers have developed many different approaches, this can be classified into two main categories: explicit event recognition and anomaly detection. An explicit event recognition system has an explicit knowledge of the events that must be identified, and once an event is detected, it can properly give that event a semantic description. The fundamental part of an explicit recognition system is thus an a priori knowledge data base that stores all the information about the recognizable events. The system behaves as a parser matching the incoming data with predefined templates in the knowledge base. Anomaly detection differs from the explicit event recognition approach because the system does not require an a priori knowledge base about the events that should be recognized.

[I. ONLINE F ARM[NG

Agriculture in India has a long history dating back to ten thousand years yet a sophisticated method of farming is not implemented. The development of a distributed in-field sensor-based site-specific irrigation system offers the potential to increase yield and quality while saving water. The deficiencies faced in the existing agriculture system can be overcome by using modem technologies such as wireless sensor networks using Zigbee which are available at low cost and consumes a very low power.

A generic block diagram shown in the Fig.l gives a brief idea about this paper. This project can be divided into three main modules such as front end, management module and monitoring and control module (User). [n the front end various actions, such as sensing the real time temperature, soil fertility, water level, humidity and capturing live video of the farm is been carried out. The management module is responsible to control the irrigation control station by gathering the real time data from the sensor network. Monitoring and control module is the user interfaced module. x

FRONT END

MANAGEMENT MODULE

USER PROJECT PORTAL

III. FRONT END

Various sensors are arranged in a definite predefined format to form a node in the front end. Each node in the front end consists of a temperature sensor, humidity sensor, fertility sensor, microcontroller, and power saving low power transmitters. A detail block diagram about each hardware units in the front end is shown in the Fig. 2.

Sensor

Control

Unit

Mode Selection

Switch

Water

Valve

Mechanis

Fig. 2 Block diagram of the front end

RF Antenna

RF Antenna

This module has the sensors and the transmitters. The different types of sensors used in the front end are temperature sensor, moisture detection sensor, water level sensor and fertility sensor. This module may have a rechargeable battery with the solar panel as its source supply. This solar panel produces the required voltage and recharges the battery. Water level sensors are used to detect the level of water from the water resource available at the farm. Wireless [p-cameras are used to monitor the farm lively with a continuous video signal which is been transmitted to the management module. Zigbee is used for the transmitter module. All the transmission process from the front end is been done with the help of zigbee.

[V. MANAGEMENT MODULE

An intelligent controller is used to manage all the process that takes place in the farm by its artificial intelligence and sometimes also by getting the control command from the user through the internet. [t is responsible for collecting the data from the front end and compares the received data with its database and performs the required action. Various actions performed by this controller are, collecting the data from the front end, controlling the irrigation control channel by opening and closing the relays and uploading the collected data into the network with the help of internet.

Fig. 3 Block diagram a/management module

ISBN: 978-l-4673-6408-9113/$31.00©20 l3IBEE

2013 International Conference on Computation of Power, Energy, Information and Communication (TCCPEIC) 73

This module has zigee transceiver, which receives the real time data from the front end and also controls the water flow to the farm with the help of relays in the irrigation control station. The received data are given to the system which has a link to the internet service. This may be a wired network where RS-232(Max232) can be used. The farm can be viewed lively from the website with the help of the IP-Cameras. These cameras are fixed in the front end to monitor the entire farm . Various cameras are available in which the coverage range varies for each model. Placing of cameras depends on the structure of the farm land. These cameras upload the video of the farm into the network on the request of the user from the monitoring module. These cameras can transmit video signal with a less bandwidth which is achieved by video motion analysis technique. By this technique the pixels in each frame of the video is been compared with its previous frame, only the pixels which differs from its previous pixels are been transmitted. As the constant pixels in the corresponding frames are not been transmitted, a large level of bandwidth can be saved.

V. MONITORING AND CONTROL MODULE

The user of this project can monitor and control the system using internet. This module discusses the software part through which the farming website is created. The farming website consists of the following pages through which the farmer can log-in and view the live status of his farm.

A.) Home page and its Parameters • Login with User Name and Password. • Sign Up to create a new account. • Retrieve the Forgotten Password.

B.) User Page and its parameters

• Farm status • View the farm with live video • Climatic condition of the farm • Weather forecasting • Temperature of the farm • Moisture level of the farm • Soil fertility of the farm • Control the farm • Get help from the experts • Share the ideas

C) User Profile and its Parameters

• Account Setting • Feed backs

VI. RESULTS

Labview 20 II is a fully featured programming language produced by National Instruments. It is a graphical language quite unique in the method by which code is constructed and saved. There is no text based codes in Labview but a

diagrammatic view of how the data flows through the program can be viewed. Using Labveiw the modules such as motor control, temperature control, humidity control and soil chemical contents mixture ratio are simulated. Htmlcss­netbeans IDE Version 7.0.1 and few open source tools available on internet are used in designing the user interactive webpage. Glass Fish serveris used to manage the database. This user interactive web module has five pages such as the Home page, Password Authentication page, User page, Modules in the user page, and a module to send Feedbacks to the administrator. The following Figures (FigA-6) gives the logic circuit diagram of the modules in which the farm parameters are been simulated using Labview and Fig.7 shows the Modules of the user page through which the user can view the live updated status of his farm using the global network.

Min Water Level

curren! Water Level

��-�

Motor Off

< .......... .............................................. '[f3 ater Level

EgA Module which indicates the on and ofT condition ofthe motor.

Current Temperature

'1.23

fOGGER

DEHUMDIflER

Current Humidity

� 123 WAVE MOTOR

fAN MOTOR

Fig.5 Temperature and Humidity monitoring.

ISBN: 978-1-4673-6408-9113/$31.00©20 13 IEEE

2013 International Conference on Computation of Power, Energy, Information and Communication (TCCPEIC) 74

�m'I ______ ii_';��'" � •• ,.

Boolean I True �

00

r �an. �.

[J1---mJ]"""""'-__ 1

Slide Ta k:4 rn:J

Fig.6 Chemical contents mixture ratio.

Fig.7 Modules of the user page in the website

Low cost moisture sensor has been designed and it is been tested. The farm parameters are been collected and it is been wirelessly transmitted from the front end to the management section through zigbee module which has consumed a low power.

VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

The farm parameters such as temperature, humidity and fertility have been collected and those values are used for Labview simulation. The results are used by the farmers to decide the actions to be done in the farm such as irrigation and preparation of fertilizers. This shows that sensors in the farm can reduce the farm work and at the same time increases productivity. A user interactive webpage has been created for the farmers to remotely monitor the farm as well as control it through Internet. The physical presence of the farmer is eliminated by the interactive website and the live video ensures that the expected work is done properly.

Various other sensors like snake detection sensors can be used to detect the presence of dangerous creatures and thereby save farmer's life. The website can be improved to include expert's advice to the naive farmers thereby increasing the nation's productivity and interaction between the farmers can be done using social network like interface which will help inexperienced farmers to get the helpful advice. A server can

be maintained with large database that provides more additional updated information to the farmers.

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[2]Jan Axelson, "Embedded Ethernet and Internet Complete

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