SOIL MOISTURE LEVEL SENSING ROBOT

SMOSBOT

INTRODUCTION

Water, as we all know, is an inevitable factor for the existence of life on earth. Today one of the major crisis that our earth faces is the scarcity of usable water. It is high-time that some measures should be taken for conservation of water.Through our project we are trying to find out a remedy for this crisis. If we could find the percentage of water (moisture) in soil, then we could decide whether the soil need or doesn’t need more moisture to support plant growth. If enough moisture is present then there is no need of watering and thus we could prevent the unnecessary wastage of water. Also we could use this robot to detect the presence of water in places where humans cannot reach such asthe heavenly bodies like moon , mars , etc.Thus water detection and promotion of water conservation are the aims of this project.

AbstractThe SMOSBOT® is a ROBOT which can detect the level of moisture in the soil. The SMOSBOT® has three main units. The first is the Rover Unit (RU) which gives mobility to the ROBOT and also acts as its base. The second is the Sensor Unit (SU) which gives the ROBOT, its sensing ability. The third is the Microcontroller Unit (MCU) and associated circuitry. A wireless (RF) interface is provided for connecting the device to the parallel port of a personal computer (PC).The Rover Unit is basically a vehicle consisting of a set of stepper motors fixed to a chassis (base). The rotation of these motors, thereby the Robot's movement, are monitored by the Microprocessor Unit according to the control signals from the PC. The sensor unit consists of two electrodes which are inserted into the soil with the help of stepper motor. The stepper motor is interfaced with the Microcontroller Unit and its rotation is controlled by the same. The Sensor Unit also consist of an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) which converts the sensed analog signal to digital code and passes it to MCU. The MCU transmits this result to the PC, through the radio frequency (RF) interface, where it is displayed using SMOSBOT® interface software (SMOSBOT- i®). The Microcontroller Unit is the brain of SMOSBOT®. It consist of an MCS®-51 compatible microcontroller and other interfacing IC's. The device interface with PC parallel port is implemented using RF interface. The RF interface consists of two RF transceivers. The first, at the MCU end which transmits/receives signal from/to the microcontroller. The second is at the PC side which performs the same operation as the former, for the PC. The PC software interface (for Windows XP operating system) is developed using a high level graphical programming language - Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0. The PC software interface provides an efficient and easy to use interface for any user. Using the software the user can control the rover and the sensor unit. The program provides a device tracking solution for finding the live position of SMOSBOT® (provided the ROBOT is within the RF transceiver range).Other features like logging, printing etc are also supported by it.

BLOCK DIAGRAM

THE MAIN PARTS.ROVER UNIT(RU) .SENSOR UNIT(SU)

.MICRO CONTROLLER(MCU)

SENSOR UNIT

lm3914

PINOUT DIAGRAM OF LM3914

8051 MCU

OF 8051 MCU

PC SOFTWARE INTERFACEPC SOFTWARE INTERFACE

FINAL PRODUCT