Publication

Abstract : From past decades, India is an agriculture-based country where the majority of the population is heavily dependent on farming. However, energy management and resource conservation continues to be the major issues in agricultural domain. The main motivations of this research is to conserve water which is a fast depleting source, and also automates the process of watering in order to reduce human workload in remote areas. In this paper, a smart irrigation alert system is developed using NodeMCU boards, a soil moisture sensor and a servo motor. The sensor measures the volumetric content of water in the soil and data is uploaded to the cloud. The main challenge addressed in this research is to seamlessly connect multiple Node MCUs to a sink (or, gateway) node such that the data can be uploaded to the cloud. Two topologies are considered. The first one is the star topology which is efficient for a kitchen garden where each of the plants is in close proximity of the sink. The second one is the multi-hop topology which is necessary in a big agriculture field. The soil moisture is sensed using multiple FC-28 sensors and uploaded to the cloud. When the moisture content drops below the threshold value, an alert notification is sent to the subscriber by e-mail and automatic watering follows by actuating the servo motor. The user can monitor and control the status of watering anywhere through the Internet. The integration of sensors, cloud and the servo motor through multiple Node MCUs is the main novelty of this work.