Sony Arouje

Last two weeks, in my free time, I was working on a system to automate  Green house or an open field. The system designed using Arduino Nano and Raspberry Pi. The Arduino is used to read sensors and control devices and the Raspberry pi is the brain that decides what to do when an event detected by Arduino. All the systems communicates wirelessly via XBee.

In normal scenario in a farm we have to

• Switch on the drip irrigation pump when the soil humidity is low.
• Switch off when the soil is wet.
• Switch on the Main motor that connects to a water source when the reservoir level goes down.
• Switch off the main motor when the reservoir is full.
• If it’s a Green house then monitor the humidity and control devices to increase or decrease the humidity. Also need to control temperature.

Below is a very ugly drawing I could come up : ), to explain the system.

Arduino based nodes

The nodes are connected to different Sensors like Soil Humidity, Temperature, Air Humidity, etc. Also the nodes can also switch on/Off drip irrigation motor, switch on/off Reservoir’s Solenoid valves, or control any hardware needed in the field.

Raspberry pi Brain

I developed this central/brain system in Nodejs. The system is very much generic and run based on configurations. So nothing is hardcoded. The XBee connected to the pi act as the coordinator and receive periodic sensor inputs from Ardunio connected in the field. This system can issue command to control devices based on the sensor inputs.

Let’s go through some of the scenarios to see how the system works.

Watering the plants: From the above picture you can see, there are 5 Arduino’s in the field sensing different parameters. For now lets think that they all reads the soil humidity. Say soil humidity value range from 0 to 100, where 0 is dry and 100 is fully wet. We need to switch on the drip irrigation motor when any of the sensor value is less than 20. Once all the sensor give a humidity value greater than 90 we need to switch off the motor.

As you can see the system need to take action based on the values coming from the sensor. Depending upon the crops these values can be changed. That’s where the Central Node js system comes into play.

In the central system, we can group the Sensor nodes and configure the triggering points. Also we can configure what to do when the triggering points reach. For e.g. in the above case we can say when the soil humidity of any sensor goes below 20, then send the Motor switch on command to the node sitting next to the Reservoir motor. To switch off the motor, the system needs approval from all the sensors, that means the motor will get switched off if all the nodes reported value is greater than 90.

Failover: What happens when a sensor node dies without sending soil humidity greater than 90 value, will the motor run whole day? No, the central system can be configured for that too, while configuring we can set up a timeout period. If the central system is not receiving high water level after a configured time, it automatically sends a Switch off command to the desired Arduino node to switch off the motor.

Filling Reservoir: From the above diagram, we can see there are two reservoirs and one Main motor. The main motor need to switch on to fill the Reservoir. Each reservoir is equipped with sensors to detect the High and Low water level. Also each water input is equipped with a solenoid valve. If the reservoir is high then the solenoid valve will close the input thus protect the reservoir from overflowing. Once all the reservoir get filled the system will switch off the Main motor before closing the last solenoid, other wise the pressure increase and can damage the Main motor.

The Arduino node will send a Water low when the water go down below a desired level. Then the central system will open the Solenoid before switching on the Main motor. The valve will open only for the reservoir where the water is low, rest all the valves will be closed.

If more than one Reservoir’s water is low then those valves will be open and the main pump will work until all the reservoir’s are filled. For e.g. say Reservoir A and B’s water level is low then both the valves will be open and switch on the main pump. A get filled and B is still not full then A’s valve will get closed. Once B is full the system will send Main pump switch off command then sends the command to close B’s valve.

System design

All the above scenarios are based on certain rules and all these rules are configurable. The central system is not aware of any rules. Based on the fields condition we need to configure it.

User can also see the activities in the farm via a dashboard. I haven’t designed any Dashboard UI yet.

Happy farming…