Development of An Intelligent IoT Based Soil Monitoring And Irrigation System

Abstract

In order for plants to thrive and have quality and increased yield, they need to be closely monitored while providing them with sufficient water supply; This need could be met by either rainfall or irrigation. In areas of little rainfall, full scale irrigation practices are employed, but some of these irrigation methods are not very efficient thus causing farmers to lose about 50% of water supplied. Therefore, this research is aimed at evaluating environmental parameters such as soil moisture, temperature and humidity while using the acquired data to develop an effective intelligent IoT based automated soil monitoring and irrigation system. These data are saved to the IoT ThingSpeak platform so that they can be used to analyzed past conditions plants thrived in to predict a future plant performance. This project was actualized using the NodeMCUESP8266 microcontroller, a DHT 11 sensor, a soil moisture sensor and a 5v water pump which was switched using a single channel 5v relay module. The results obtained shows that an intelligent IoT based automated soil monitoring and irrigation system could be designed and implemented to optimize crop performance and manage and control irrigation systems.