A Wireless Application of Drip Irrigation Supported by Soil Moisture Sensors

In the past couple of decades, there is rapid growth in terms of technology in the field of agriculture. Traditional instrumentation based on discrete and wired solutions, presents many difficulties on measuring and control systems especially over the large geographical areas. An intention of this topic is to describe the design and implementation of a low-cost multi-mode control for an irrigation system. The system uses soil water potential measurements, the weather condition parameters and the set points data provided by the user to decide when and how much water to apply to the irrigated field. The designed system has 3 units namely: Base Station Unit (BSU), Valve Unit (VU) and Sensor Unit (SU), mainly focuses on predicting the start of germination of the disease. Sensor Unit is used to detect different environmental condition across the farm and the sensed data is displayed on LCD using ARM. ARM processor wirelessly transmits different environmental conditions across the farm to Base Station Unit where data is stored, and analyzed. Base Station Unit checks the present data with stored condition and if matches then it commands ARM to operate relay in the Valve Unit. Full circuit and program codes were implemented to verify system operation. This describes an application of a wireless sensor network using XBEE for low-cost wireless controlled irrigation solution and real time monitoring of water content of soil. In addition, the developed irrigation method removes the need for workmanship for flooding irrigation.