IoT-Based Soil Condition Monitoring Framework

Abstract

Agriculture is the backbone of all the developing countries. Focusing on encouraging innovation in agriculture, smart farming is the answer to the problems that the industry is currently facing. The application of technology on agriculture is a new focus industry in Malaysia, where farmers start to adopt technologies for remote monitoring and use the microcontroller to perform specific decision to meet the desired condition. Farmers can get the required data or information as well as monitor his agriculture sector. IoT connects the whole world with the help of sensors, actuators and other embedded devices. Due to the rapid increase in the population, the production of crops has to be increased. Crop growth is based on soil nutrient level and its moisture level. The nutrient level has to be monitored frequently for crop production. This paper provides a brief overview of the soil monitoring system using sensors. Various sensors are used to measure temperature, moisture and light, humidity and pH value. The information from the sensors in the soil is sent to the MCP3204 ADC and from ADC to the cloud via Raspberry Pi. Finally, information saved to cloud can be viewed through mobile phone as well as laptop. With the information obtained, farmer can tell which crop is suitable with given soil parameter. Thus, this can help the farmers to know the accurate parameters of the soil to make better decision in applying the fertilizers accordingly.