Automatic Fish Feeder System for Aquaponics using Wi-Fi Based WSN

Abstract

Aquaponics is a farming method, which is the combination of aquaculture and hydroponics, which grows fish and plants together in one integrated system. The fish waste provides an organic food source for the plants, and the plants naturally filter the water for the fish. The purpose of this project is to build an automatic fish feeder system for aquaponics using image processing technique with the help of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). This helps the farmers to reduce manual effort and safeguard a balanced food delivery. The number of fish in the pond may vary over time, so the amount of fish feed provided need to be changed. As there will be a large number of fish moving randomly in a pond, the manual tracking and counting of fish is very difficult. It is a time consuming and erroneous process. This work focuses on developing a system that tracks and counts the fish in the pond for aquaponics. This automatic fish identification system processes the video of the entire pond and makes it easier to estimate the count of fish. The frames from the video are processed using Raspberry-Pi board and the count of fish is transmitted through Wi-Fi. Such a system would assist to feed the fish accordingly. Based on the count transferred, a fish feeder mechanism is controlled using NodeMCU at the other end of the Wi-Fi. The amount of fish feed remaining in the feeding box is informed to the user through mobile application.