Remote-Control System for Greenhouse Based on Open Source Hardware

Abstract

With the development of technologies such as the Internet of Things and Big Data, agriculture is entering the digital age. Modern information technology and intelligent equipment are the development direction of agriculture. In this paper, a remote-control system for greenhouse environment was developed based on Raspberry Pi, MySQL and Android. The system consists of a greenhouse control system (subsystem A), an environment monitoring system (subsystem B), a MySQL remote database (subsystem C), and an Android monitoring software (subsystem D). The subsystem A is used to implement automatic fertigation and collect data from subsystem B, which will be uploaded to cloud server database (subsystem C). The subsystem B is used to monitor the environmental parameters in the greenhouse such as air temperature/humidity, soil temperature/humidity etc. The subsystem C is used for storage of greenhouse environment data and communication between subsystem B and subsystem D. The subsystem D is used for data visualization including real-time display, storage and analysis of greenhouse environmental data, and remote control of fertigation system including the EC/pH control of the fertigation solution, irrigation scheduling, and fertigation settings. A proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control algorithm is used for the fertigation process of the subsystem A. The low-power LoRa technology is used for subsystem B to achieve low-power long-distance data transmission, which is especially suitable to greenhouses. All monitoring settings can be operated remotely by users.