IoT Enabled Smart Fertilization and Irrigation Aid for Agricultural Purposes

Soil is of great importance to agriculture, especially the moisture and nutrients in the soil are the essential ingredients for growing plants and crops. Therefore, benefits and importance of a soil moisture and nutrient monitoring system in modern agriculture and gardening is undeniable. It can also be an interesting feature of an intelligent home or smart agriculture system using the internet of things (IoT) technology. This paper presents an IoT application in Arduino platform aiming to monitor the change in soil moisture and Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K) (NPK) value for an indoor plant using moisture sensors and optical transducers. Other functionalities and important features of this prototype include online data display infographic as user feedback, level-based nutrient classification for enabling proper type of fertilizer selection, hardware and e-mail notification of moisture and nutrients' easily accessible and user-friendly smartphone app

Building a Smart Gardening System and Plant Monitoring Using IoT

Gardening activities usually required a lot of time and gardeners may face varieties of problems such as sticking to the designated watering schedule. Thus, this paper intends to solve these problems by introducing the Smart Gardening System. By using this system, users will be able to control and monitor the watering schedule and the sufficiency of lights while ensuring that the plants are taken care of accordingly. The smart gardening system is different from the normal gardening products that are already available in the market because of the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) in the system to facilitate the work for its users. By using this home-based system, users can set the watering and lighting schedule automatically by using the designated application via smartphone. Besides, users will also be notified on the moisture level of soil, light-exposure, and the water level in water tank through the application. This will allow the users to monitor the watering system and only come to refill it when the water tank is empty. This system is an advantage as it can run automatically. From this research, the benefit of smart gardening system is proven via the execution of IoT which requires less human intervention for the system to operate. Moreover, the sensors are used to gather and update all the data that is convenience to the user to keep updated on the parameter and information about the plant in a real time without physical present

Sustainable gardens for smart cities using low-power communications

This paper presents a study on smart gardens in the context of smart cities, a topic that has been gaining more and more interest from the public due to the numerous problems that are felt both in terms of the environment and in terms of food consumption which, due to population increase and migration towards cities, has become a sustainability problem as agricultural production is moving further away from the consumers thus making it harder to obtain fresh good such as fruits and vegetables. Using IoT combined with communication technologies such as LoRa that have Low-power and wide-area network capabilities, it is possible to create systems that enhance sustainability through a more efficient use of resources while also making its users be more involved with the plant cultivation process and, therefore, develop more empathy towards this topic and nature in general. Several smart garden systems and contexts in which those systems are implemented will be analyzed to understand what can be done within this research field.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Adaptalight: An inexpensive PAR sensor system for daylight harvesting in a Micro Indoor Smart Hydroponic System

Environmental changes and the reduction in arable land have led to food security concerns around the world, particularly in urban settings. Hydroponic soilless growing methods deliver plant nutrients using water, conserving resources and can be constructed nearly anywhere. Hydroponic systems have several complex attributes that need to be managed, and this can be daunting for the layperson. Micro Indoor Smart Hydroponics (MISH) leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technology to manage the complexities of hydroponic techniques, for growing food at home for everyday citizens. Two prohibitive costs in the advancement of MISH systems are power consumption and equipment expense. Reducing cost through harvesting ambient light can potentially reduce power consumption but must be done accurately to sustain sufficient plant yields. Photosynthetic Active Radiation (PAR) meters are commercially used to measure only the light spectrum that plants use, but are expensive. This study presents Adaptalight, a MISH system that harvests ambient light using an inexpensive AS7265x IoT sensor to measure PAR. The system is built on commonly found IoT technology and a well-established architecture for MISH systems. Adpatalight was deployed in a real-world application in the living space of an apartment and experiments were carried out accordingly. A two-phase experiment was conducted over three months, each phase lasting 21 days. Phase one measured the IoT sensor’s capability to accurately measure PAR. Phase two measured the ability of the system to harvest ambient PAR light and produce sufficient yields, using the calibrated IoT sensor from phase one. The results showed that the Adaptalight system was successful in saving a significant amount of power, harvesting ambient PAR light and producing yields with no significant differences from the control. The amount of power savings would be potentially greater in a location with more ambient light. Additionally, the findings show that, when calibrated, the AS7265x sensor is well suited to accurately measure PAR light in MISH systems

Ag-IoT for crop and environment monitoring: Past, present, and future

CONTEXT: Automated monitoring of the soil-plant-atmospheric continuum at a high spatiotemporal resolution is a key to transform the labor-intensive, experience-based decision making to an automatic, data-driven approach in agricultural production. Growers could make better management decisions by leveraging the real-time field data while researchers could utilize these data to answer key scientific questions. Traditionally, data collection in agricultural fields, which largely relies on human labor, can only generate limited numbers of data points with low resolution and accuracy. During the last two decades, crop monitoring has drastically evolved with the advancement of modern sensing technologies. Most importantly, the introduction of IoT (Internet of Things) into crop, soil, and microclimate sensing has transformed crop monitoring into a quantitative and data-driven work from a qualitative and experience-based task. OBJECTIVE: Ag-IoT systems enable a data pipeline for modern agriculture that includes data collection, transmission, storage, visualization, analysis, and decision-making. This review serves as a technical guide for Ag-IoT system design and development for crop, soil, and microclimate monitoring. METHODS: It highlighted Ag-IoT platforms presented in 115 academic publications between 2011 and 2021 worldwide. These publications were analyzed based on the types of sensors and actuators used, main control boards, types of farming, crops observed, communication technologies and protocols, power supplies, and energy storage used in Ag-IoT platforms

A Systematic Review of IoT Solutions for Smart Farming

The world population growth is increasing the demand for food production. Furthermore, the reduction of the workforce in rural areas and the increase in production costs are challenges for food production nowadays. Smart farming is a farm management concept that may use Internet of Things (IoT) to overcome the current challenges of food production. This work uses the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews (PRISMA) methodology to systematically review the existing literature on smart farming with IoT. The review aims to identify the main devices, platforms, network protocols, processing data technologies and the applicability of smart farming with IoT to agriculture. The review shows an evolution in the way data is processed in recent years. Traditional approaches mostly used data in a reactive manner. In more recent approaches, however, new technological developments allowed the use of data to prevent crop problems and to improve the accuracy of crop diagnosis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

THE ROLE OF INDOOR SMART GARDENS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SMART AGRICULTURE IN URBAN AREAS

The increasing global population and urbanization have led to a growing interest in urban farming to provide sustainable food production. Indoor smart gardens, a new form of urban farming, have emerged as an innovative and technology-based solution to urban agriculture. This paper explores the role of indoor smart gardens in modern urban farming and their potential impact on food production, environmental sustainability, and human health. Consequently, comparison was used of traditional outdoor farming vs. indoor smart gardening. Also, a comparative study was conducted using the case study of two leading brands of indoor smart gardens: Aerogarden and Click & Grow. The research’s results show that smart gardens have significant potential to revolutionize urban farming practices and address the growing demand for food production in urban areas. Our review of the literature and case study showed that smart gardens can significantly increase food production, improve environmental sustainability, and enhance human health in urban areas

development and testing of a platform aimed at pervasive monitoring of indoor environment and building energy

Abstract The interest of the building energy sector is leaning towards the measurement of building actual performance, as regards both indoor environment quality and energy consumption. Sensors and central elaboration units aimed at monitoring indoor environment and HVAC system parameters can also provide the basic infrastructure for further applications such as predictive and neuro-fuzzy controls. However, the cost of such systems is high, so they are mainly used in large buildings. This paper describes the main features and expected applications for a low-budget monitoring platform currently under development and tuning. In particular, the monitoring system was developed based on electronic prototyping platform Arduino and on sensors and devices usually available in the retail market of electronics. The monitoring platform has been designed with the following characteristics in mind: replicability, full remote control, portability, versatility, reliability and affordability

Internet of things and LoRaWAN enabled future smart farming

It is estimated that to keep pace with the predicted population growth over the next decades, agricultural processes involving food production will have to increase their output up to 70 percent by 2050. "Precision" or "smart" agriculture is one way to make sure that these goals for future food supply, stability, and sustainability can be met. Applications such as smart irrigation systems can utilize water more efficiently, optimizing electricity consumption and costs of labor; sensors on plants and soil can optimize the delivery of nutrients and increase yields. To make all this smart farming technology viable, it is important for it to be low-cost and farmer-friendly. Fundamental to this IoT revolution is thus the adoption of low-cost, long-range communication technologies that can easily deal with a large number of connected sensing devices without consuming excessive power. In this article, a review and analysis of currently available long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN)-enabled IoT application for smart agriculture is presented. LoRaWAN limitations and bottlenecks are discussed with particular focus on their effects on agri-tech applications. A brief description of a testbed in development is also given, alongside a review of the future research challenges that this will help to tackle

Urban Gardening System for Home Organic Vegetables: LED Artificial Light and Irrigation Control

Due to the limited amount of space in urban homes, the trend of indoor gardening is growing as it is the most suitable gardening method in the specified environment; moreover, it provides the possibility of growing organic vegetables at home. This paper presents the design and construction of an urban indoor gardening system for growing organic vegetables, with automated functions. LEDs in the spectra of R (637 nm) B (455 nm) and white (3500 K) were applied as horticultural light and were designed using the horticulture lighting calculation tool. The automated irrigation system was controlled by Arduino-based soil moisture sensors. The urban indoor gardener prototype had a cultivation bed of 0.385 m2. The results showed that the LED panel could emit a photosynthetic photon flux density of around 200 ± 7 µmol m-2s-1 with an R to B ratio of 0.7 ± 0.04, and a photoperiod of 16 h per day. The soil moisture control system is automatic and can regulate the soil moisture to the appropriate percentage for agricultural use, which is 50% to 69%. Consequently, it is able to save water and provide an alternative method for efficient water use. The urban indoor gardening system is compact and can be placed in a small indoor corner. The presented system was able to produce organic green-oak lettuce with a weight of 1272.54 g/crop in a restricted area, providing an ease-of-use experience and requiring very little maintenance