The Use of Internet of Things technology to develop a smart farm prototype for pig farming

Abstract

This research aims to develop a smart farm prototype using Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The objectives are 1) to design and construct environment monitor and control systems of the housing and 2) to design and build an IoT feeding control system. The development is under the system development process at the pig farms in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, Thailand, using open-source hardware and software. This system utilizes a ESP8266 Wi-Fi microcontroller, which functions to connect different sensors data to server and control the actuators. The MQTT protocol for data transferred over a secure wireless local network. Node-RED for designing the flow of data is stored on the server using a NoSQL database such as InFluxDB. In this research, it was found that the measured temperature was an average of 28 °C ranging from 24.43 °C to 34.34 °C. The humidity was an average of 92%. The feeding control system is following the instructions 100% of the time. Users can access data and control the system via a web application with a smartphone or a computer in real-time. Additionally, the collected information is processed and analyzed as big data for forecasting or studying climate change around the study point in the future. The overall system performance evaluation was at the highest level achieving on average 4.50 out of 5 with a standard deviation of 0.47 from the users. Therefore, the developed IoT system could be used as a prototype and expanded to a larger farm or other kinds of farms.