Abstract
The rapid development and wide application of the IoT (Internet of Things) has pushed toward the improvement of current practices in greenhouse technology and agriculture in general, through automation and informatization. The experimental and accurate determination of soil moisture is a matter of great importance in different scientific fields, such as agronomy, soil physics, geology, hydraulics, and soil mechanics. This paper focuses on the experimental characterization of a commercial low-cost “capacitive” coplanar soil moisture sensor that can be housed in distributed nodes for IoT applications. It is shown that at least for a well-defined type of soil with a constant solid matter to volume ratio, this type of capacitive sensor yields a reliable relationship between output voltage and gravimetric water content.
Highlights
The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a global network of intelligent objects, or “things,” based on sensors, i.e., microcontrollers augmented with networking capabilities
(2)), coplanar capacitive sensors yielded in this case, for a constant γdry (see again Equation (2)), coplanar capacitive sensors yielded aa reliable reliable relationship
A commercial “capacitive” soil moisture sensor typically housed in low-cost distributed nodes for IoT applications was experimentally sensor typically housed in low-cost distributed nodes for IoT applications was experimentally characterized in order to get acquainted on how the sensor operates
Summary
The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a global network of intelligent objects, or “things,” based on sensors, i.e., microcontrollers augmented with networking capabilities. In this framework, communication technologies can improve the current methods of monitoring, supporting the response appropriately in real time for a wide range of applications [1,2,3,4]. Sensors are designed for collecting information (e.g., temperature, pressure, light, humidity, soil moisture, etc.) whereas network-capable microcontrollers are able to process, store, and interpret information, building intelligent wireless sensor networks (WSN) [5,6,7]. A description of a modular IoT architecture for several applications including but not limited to healthcare, health monitoring, and precision agriculture is reported in previous works [12,13]
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