Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor Node for IoT in Agriculture and Home

Growing food for nine billion people is a challenge we will face in near future. Digital technologies hold a great promise to increase efficiency and use resources effectively. In this paper we present a low-power and scalable IoT-based architecture for home farmers and scientific purposes that enables to verify the environmental impact on plants developments by monitoring the soil moisture and temperature. The measured values are transmitted via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to a gateway, e.g., a smartphone running the gateway app, to a cloud platform that stores and processes the data. This data is useful to give home farmers vital information, e.g., when to water a plant or when the plant is prune to get infected by a disease. This information is of great importance because it helps to decrease crop failures and thus farm more efficient. The hardware and software architecture presented is scalable and designed to consume low power. Experiments show that it is possible to create a high-spatial resolution by putting many sensor nodes on a small area, in order to help research to measure micro-climate.