Microcontroller based granular urea application attachment for rice transplanter

Md Mosharraf Hossain,Md Towfiqur Rahman,Md Monjurul Alam,Muhammad Rashed Al Mamun

doi:10.3329/jbau.v17i3.43219

Md Mosharraf Hossain, Md Towfiqur Rahman + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3329/jbau.v17i3.43219

Copy DOI

Abstract

Transplanting and fertilizer application for rice production in Bangladesh are tedious, time consuming and laborious task, and mostly done manually. Mechanical transplanting of rice becoming popular in the country in recent years and few machines have been developed for granular urea deep placement, however, having some limitations. Placing granular urea precisely along with rice transplanting, an attempt was under taken to design and fabricate an electronic control granular urea applicator to be attach with a 4-row walk behind type rice transplanter. Fabrication of the electronic granular urea applicator was done in the workshop of the Department of Farm Power and Machinery, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh. Physical structure of the attachment was assembled with available parts of BARI granular urea applicator. A DC gear motor was coupled with metering disk shaft to rotate and pick granular urea from hopper. Moreover, its speed was synchronized with the picker speed of the rice transplanter by a microcontroller Arduino Mega 2560. A computer program was developed and compiled successfully into Arduino IDE, where an equation was derived and incorporated into loop control structure. The program can also be used for any kind of applications where variable rate is required. The machine was found successful in test run and laboratory-based experiments. Average spacing of granular urea placement was found 34.71 cm with 1.38% missing hill, Its power requirement was found about 20 W. This innovation provided options for performing granular urea application and rice transplanting, two most laborious tasks simultaneously which might minimize the cost of production as well as human drudgery with an error free manner. J Bangladesh Agril Univ 17(3): 380–387, 2019

Highlights

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the major food crops nearly half of the world’s population
Few of the operations of rice production are being partially mechanized in recent time
The Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller board was programmed with the calibration of motor RPM considering dynamic ratio of transplanting speed and granular urea application

Summary

Introduction

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the major food crops nearly half of the world’s population. Transplanting of paddy is still manual and recognized as most tedious and time-consuming task that requires about 123-150 man h ha−1 and roughly 19-22% of the total labor requirement of rice production (Islam et al, 2015). This task is commonly practiced as a method of weed control in wet or puddled soil. Manual application of granular urea at accurate pace is labor intensive, cumbersome and very slow method It takes 200–300 man-h to apply urea granule in one hectare of land. An attempt was made to design and fabricate a micro-controller based granular urea applicator as an attachment with a 4-row walk behind type rice transplanter for simultaneous rice planting and granular urea application, and determine missing rate, power consumption and distribution pattern of the applicator

Materials and Methods

Results and Discussion

Conclusion