Abstract
Seed imbibition, absorption of water by a dry seed, is an essential process in which embryo hydration and root establishment occur. In natural environments, this process occurs beneath the soil, making it difficult to observe preliminary growth of seeds. This paper presents a new technique for tracking the imbibition of corn seeds. The proposed system is designed to measure imbibition through seed expansion and wirelessly transmit data, permitting the system to remain beneath the soil with the subject seed. The system consists of low-cost commercial off-the-shelf components and 3D-printed probes. The proposed system is optimized to measure the size of multiple seeds with a single Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) pin by utilizing the General-Purpose Input Output (GPIO) pins of the microcontroller, to reconfigure connections to supply voltage or ground. The circuit design of the system shows low power consumption compared to other conventional circuits and utilizes fewer components by taking advantage of the microcontroller GPIOs. Additionally, the proposed circuit design shows less error and insensitivity to the supply voltage variations.
Highlights
The importance of soil to plants is undeniable since soil provides plants with all the nutrition they need to grow
The intimate relationship between plant and soil starts from imbibition where the dry seed thermodynamically takes water from the soil, hydrates its embryo, and activates its metabolism
In an experiment performed by the Iowa State University, 125,000 soybean seeds were planted on an acre of land
Summary
The importance of soil to plants is undeniable since soil provides plants with all the nutrition they need to grow. Image-based techniques for imbibition detection are favorable because no physical contact with the seed is required, preventing invasion of the growing environment. These methods do not provide an accurate systematic quantitative analysis, due to interference from the residing soil. Some of these imaging techniques are only possible on seeds with cork shell surroundings [8]. The proposed solution is a system that can measure imbibition based on the size of the subject seed, while being able to remain beneath the seeds’ residing soil while measuring Doing so combines both the accuracy of physical measurement with the lack of invading the seed environment.
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