Development of Solar-Powered Crop Soil Conditions Monitoring System Using Internet of Things (IoT)

Abstract The demand for food and agriculture production is increasing day by day. To cope with this situation, the traditional method used by farmers to monitor their crops needs to be improved. This project proposes a low-cost agriculture monitoring system that is capable of sending real-time crop soil conditions to farmers to help them in making the best decisions such as for planting and watering. The proposed monitoring system is equipped with a DHT11, LDR, and soil moisture sensor to monitor temperature, humidity, and other parameters. The internet of things (IoT) is implemented in this system to send all the information from sensors to the Cloud and display it through the ThingSpeak website. The mobile application named MY_FARM will read all the data from the ThingSpeak website to display and send a push notification to the farmers instantly if the crop soil conditions are out of the acceptable range. Based on the observation, the serial monitor and the ThingSpeak website will be updated with new data for every 20 seconds. Solar PV-based battery is proposed as the main power supply of the system, hence possible to be installed in remote areas. The experimental result demonstrates that the PV-based battery can charge and discharge and supply power to the system for about 11 hours before needs to be recharged.