Open-Source Wireless Cloud-Connected Agricultural Sensor Network

Agricultural research involves study of the complex soil–plant–atmosphere–water system, and data relating to this system must be collected under often-harsh outdoor conditions in agricultural environments. Rapid advancements in electronic technologies in the last few decades, as well as more recent widespread proliferation and adoption of electronic sensing and communications, have created many options to address the needs of professional, as well as amateur, researchers. In this study, an agricultural research project was undertaken to collect data and examine the effects of different agronomic practices on yield, with the objectives being to develop a monitoring system to measure soil moisture and temperature conditions in field plots and to upload the data to an internet website. The developed system included sensor nodes consisting of sensors and electronic circuitry to read and transmit sensor data via radio and a cellular gateway to receive node data and forward the data to an internet website via cellular infrastructure. Microcontroller programs were written to control the nodes and gateway, and an internet website was configured to receive and display sensor data. The battery-powered sensor nodes cost $170 each, including electronic circuitry and sensors, and they were operated throughout the cropping season with little maintenance on a single set of batteries. The solar-powered gateway cost $163 to fabricate, plus an additional cost of $2 per month for cellular network access. Wireless and cellular data transmissions were reliable, successfully transferring 95% of sensor data to the internet website. Application of open-source hardware, wireless data transfer, and internet-based data access therefore offers many options and advantages for agricultural sensing and monitoring efforts.

[1]  Aloys Mvuma,et al.  Wireless Sensor Networks for Water Quality Monitoring and Control within Lake Victoria Basin: Prototype Development , 2014 .

[2]  Reginald S. Fletcher,et al.  Development of an Open-Source Cloud-Connected Sensor-Monitoring Platform , 2018, IoT 2018.

[3]  Joshua M. Pearce,et al.  Building Research Equipment with Free, Open-Source Hardware , 2012, Science.

[4]  MisraSudip,et al.  Wireless sensor networks for agriculture , 2015 .

[5]  Antonio-Javier Garcia-Sanchez,et al.  Wireless sensor network deployment for integrating video-surveillance and data-monitoring in precision agriculture over distributed crops , 2011 .

[6]  Giovanni Bitella,et al.  A Novel Low-Cost Open-Hardware Platform for Monitoring Soil Water Content and Multiple Soil-Air-Vegetation Parameters , 2014, Sensors.

[7]  Ayman M. Hassan.  Web-based irrigation management for open canals using Wireless Sensor Networks , 2013, 2013 IEEE Conference on Wireless Sensor (ICWISE).

[8]  Abdul Hanan Abdullah,et al.  A survey of wireless sensor network approaches and their energy consumption for monitoring farm fields in precision agriculture , 2014, Precision Agriculture.

[9]  Ahmad Khalilian,et al.  An Arduino-Based Wireless Sensor Network for Soil Moisture Monitoring Using Decagon EC-5 Sensors , 2017 .

[10]  Denisa Kera,et al.  Science Artisans and Open Science Hardware , 2017 .

[11]  Ahmad Khalilian,et al.  Development of a Low-Cost Internet-of-Things (IoT) System for Monitoring Soil Water Potential Using Watermark 200SS Sensors , 2017 .

[12]  Marco Zennaro,et al.  Successful Deployment of a Wireless Sensor Network for Precision Agriculture in Malawi , 2012, 2012 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Networked Embedded Systems for Every Application (NESEA).

[13]  Francisco Javier Ferrández Pastor,et al.  Developing Ubiquitous Sensor Network Platform Using Internet of Things: Application in Precision Agriculture , 2016, Sensors.

[14]  Ram Prasadh Narayanan,et al.  Survey on Motes Used in Wireless Sensor Networks: Performance & Parametric Analysis , 2016 .

[15]  Daniel K. Fisher,et al.  Open-Source Hardware Is a Low-Cost Alternative for Scientific Instrumentation and Research , 2012 .

[16]  Narendra Singh Raghuwanshi,et al.  Wireless sensor networks for agriculture: The state-of-the-art in practice and future challenges , 2015, Comput. Electron. Agric..