The Feasibility of a Cloud-Based Low-Cost Environmental Monitoring System Via Open Source Hardware in Greenhouses

Abstract

One of
 the most critical parameters in agricultural production is environmental
 conditions. It is of vital importance to ensure and monitor suitable climatic
 conditions for various controlled agricultural structures and production
 systems such as greenhouses. To this aim, most data monitoring systems cannot
 be efficiently used due to high cost and insufficient technical knowledge. It
 is possible to design low-cost and scalable monitoring, control and data
 acquisition systems via open source hardware in order to monitor climatic data
 for agricultural practices in small enterprises and rural areas. In this study,
 a low-cost system designed via open source hardware was tested under real
 conditions. Temperature and relative humidity were measured via the sensors in
 the system and sent to a data server through a wireless network. In addition,
 collected data was compared to reference devices for statistical analysis. The
 results suggest that these low-cost systems, which are designed via open source
 hardware, can be used as a data collection and decision support system by
 agricultural enterprises.