Internet of Things Applied to Solar-Powered Smart Agricultural Monitoring System: A Prototype Development

Abstract

This paper introduces the prototype development of plant monitoring and smart irrigation using Internet of Things (IoT). The main purpose of development is to provide a utility model prototype with a combined technology in monitoring a vegetable farm for irrigation system.   In the process of development, an adaptive process from traditional irrigation was utilized to illustrate and verify aspects of smart irrigation’s conceptual design. A Circuit board was designed and developed to position the GSM and wi-fi modules, microcontrollers, relays, transistors, capacitors and other circuit devices.  A photovoltaic energy was utilized in driving the circuit board to complete its electrical function. The IoT devices used were soil moisture sensors, Arduino microcontroller, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) module, Wi-Fi module, and solenoid valves. Cloud computing coupled with the use of several development software like Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), MySQL database and Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) were utilized.

 The developed prototype was built at the nursery of the City Agriculture office of Cauayan City, Isabela, Philippines. Technical aspects were evaluated by Information Technology Experts and was validated using quality standards on IoT Application Quality Management (IoT-AQM) in terms of functionality, reliability, efficiency and portability. Costs associated in the development of the prototype were presented together with the materials used.  Solar-powered smart irrigation system is one of the answers of traditional irrigation system in the Philippines. It is one of the solutions to a water shortage in vegetable farming where outcomes tell us that this result can be executed for a lessening of water loss and decrease the manpower necessary for farming. It is recommended that the Philippine government should initiate small projects using solar energy for every barangay so that vegetable farmers can gradually adopt the concept and practice precision farming.