Smartphone-Operated Smart Farm Watering System Using Long-Range Communication Technology

Abstract

Keeping proper soil moisture is essential in growing good quality and efficient fruit yield. To that effect, soil moisture level must be controlled, to maintain proper watering. A smartphone application was developed to operate a smart farm watering system. It monitors the soil’s moisture and launches sprayers to water dried areas. The system’s architecture was built in a distributed client-server computing system, in a small computing grid. The grid was built across long range (LoRa) communication networks with the same ID, but different addresses. In terms of integration, the system was built using autonomous microprocessors, which consist of a server and five client microprocessors. A smartphone was used as the server of a central controller, and four moisture detection modules and a water spraying system module were used as autonomous clients. The server was inter-connected with the clients via a star-type topology network in the polling processes. Each client module autonomously analyzes the measured digital voltage of the moisture sensor plugged into the soil. When the server sends queries regarding the status of the moisture level, the client sends the request signal to the server using the LoRa communication technology. The communication between the server and the clients is based on the LoRa communication technology. The LoRa-to-Bluetooth converter is used to connect the Bluetooth and the LoRa signal. The field test was performed in a watermelon field, with an area of approximately 6600 m². The water spraying system constructed with LoRa communication technology could successfully manage and control the moisture level in the field test.