2015 IEEE 2015 International Conference on Computer, Communication, and Control Technology (I4CT 2015), April 21 - 23 in

Imperial Kuching Hotel, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

Smart Farm Monitoring Using Raspberry Pi

and Arduino

Siwakorn Jindarat Pongpisitt Wuttidittachotti

Faculty of Information Technology Faculty of Information Technology
King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok
Bangkok, Thailand Bangkok, Thailand
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract—This study aimed to investigate an establishment farming problems. Smart Farm could perceive any changed
using an Intelligent System which employed an Embedded information derived from a semi-automatic microprocessor,
System and Smart Phone for chicken farming management and alarming all notification to a connected personal computer. The
problem solving using Raspberry Pi and Arduino Uno. An farm monitoring could be conducted via application programs
experiment and comparative analysis of the intelligent system on smart phones for convenience use, time saving, and
was applied in a sample chicken farm in this study. The findings increasing labor reduces.
of this study found that the system could monitor surrounding
weather conditions including humidity, temperature, climate II. RELATED WORK
quality, and also the filter fan switch control in the chicken farm.
The system was found to be comfortable for farmers to use as This research has focused on the use of modern technology to
they could effectively control the farm anywhere at anytime, help manage animal farming, which means farm management
resulting in cost reduction, asset saving, and productive automation in various ways. Manakant Intarakamhaeng and et al
management in chicken farming. [4] studied the model of farm management automation technology
Keywords—Embedded System; Raspberry Pi; Arduino; Android; Smart
with RFID, Result; the adoption of RFID, or radio-frequency
Phone; identification of objects and animals including 5 kinds of animal:
cattle, buffalo, sheep, pigs and rabbits were successfully
I. INTRODUCTION individually identified and recorded automatically.
Md Saifudaullah Bin Bahrudin and Rosni Abu Kassim [5]
Thailand was considered as an agricultural wealthy presented a fire alarm system in a real-time monitoring system
country in terms of food and environmental resources. that detected the presence of smoke in the air due to fire and
Nevertheless, such prosperity was gradually regressed directly captured images via a camera installed inside a room when a
contributing to a low agricultural productivity and farmer fire occurs. The embedded systems used to develop this fire
incomes. The farmers additionally lacked insights in alarm system were Raspberry Pi and Arduino Uno. The key
agricultural marketing strategies and high quality production feature of the system is the ability to remotely send an alert
planning. [1] when a fire is detected. When the presence of smoke is
According to world’s agricultural produce, chicken is the detected, the system will display an image of the room state in
most favored produce, since it is a nutrient-rich food providing a web page. The system will need the user confirmation to
high protein, low fat and cholesterol, and lower energy than report the event to the Firefighter using a Short Message
other kinds of poultries. Also, it is quite easy to look after and Service (SMS). The advantage of using this system is that it
propagate its species. [2] For 5 years, the chicken production will reduce the possibility of false alert reported to the
in Thailand has been increasing on an average of 4.63% yearly Firefighter. The camera will only capture an image, so this
because of standardized farming management and good system will consume only a little storage and power.
manufacturing practices, leading to more chicken consumption Kumar and Hancke [6] presented an animal health monitoring
and an increased export number of both domestic and system (AHMS) for monitoring the physiological parameters such
international destinations. On the other hand, a lacking of as rumination, body temperature, and heart rate with surrounding
labor in chicken production processes has affected fresh temperature and humidity. The developed system could also
chicken export, which is found to be the principal problem. [3] analyze the stress level corresponding to thermal humidity index
Another significant obstacle can be wrong knowledge sharing (THI). The IEEE802.15.4 and IEEE1451.2 standards based sensor
and folk wisdom in chicken farming which effects efficiency. module was also developed successfully. The zigbee device and
This study aims to set up a new model by using a modern PIC18F455 microcontroller were used in the implementation of
technology applied to chicken farming known as a "Smart sensor module. The graphical user interface (GUI) is implemented
Farm" or "Intelligent Farm", which is expected to clear up the in LabVIEW 9.0 according to the IEEE1451.1 standard. The real

978-1-4799-7952-3/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 284

time monitoring of physiological and behavioural parameters that you must use an external analog-to-digital converter
can be present on the GUI PC. The device is very helpful and (ADC) or connect the Pi to an interface board must be used.
a inexpensive health care of livestock. A prototype model was
B. Arduino
developed and tested with high accuracy results.
From the above.There are many new technologies that can Arduino is an open-source microcontroller compatible with
be used in a more efficient management of farms. The authors developed platforms. The controller appears not to be
study has focused on the importance of modern technology of expensive and uses low electrical power, 5.5 volts. C and C++
Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Smart Phone combined with were employed for this development. Arduino can connect to
chicken farming. a computer via the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and perform
with compatible connected accessories in both analog signal
and digital signal.
III. CONCEPT DIAGRAM The Arduino [9] is a microcontroller platform, mounted on
a board that plugs easily into most computers. It allows the
user to program the onboard Atmega chip to do various things
with programming language, in programs called sketches.
C. Humidity Sensor module
Environmental conditions directly affect animal livelihood
contributing to some chronic epidemics such as Bird Flu and
Hand Foot and Mouth Disease. Therefore, DHT22 is use as a
censor for measuring temperature (for both Fahrenheit and
Celsius value) and humidity. The measurement unit will be
demonstrated in a digital signal form.
D. Gas Sensor module
The module works as a Air Quality Detection Gas Sensor,
this is sensitive to gas dangerous to human, applied to measure
NH3, NOx, Alchohol, Benzene, CO, and CO2. The module is
also used for controlling weather conditions and air cleaners in
buildings. The measurement unit is presented in a analog
signal.
In this research, three censor forms were used, consisting of MQ-2,
MQ-135, and MQ-136 because of its gas measurement differences.
Fig. 1: Full Block diagram of the system.
E. Photosensitive sensor module (LDR)
A light sensor was used for measurement of light intensity
IV. SYSTEM OVERVIEW especially for naked eye light, its unit is called Lux [8].
Shown in figure 1, components of the automatic farming Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) is a light sensitive
system on Raspberry Pi Model-B and Arduino Uno are resistance changing electronic resistance when there is a light
demonstrated. The system can notify using a real-time incidence, called Photo Resistor or Photo Conductor. The
alarming system to smart phones reporting such as the current resistor was made from Semiconductor, Cadmium Sulfide
and daily highest/lowest temperature, humidity, and weather (Cds) or Cadmium Selenide (CdSe). These two substances are
quality of the farm surroundings. Users can also control the semiconductors coated in a ceramic sheet as a base.
filter fan switches and customize the notification system to the
F. Hardware connection
smart phone.
The Raspberry Pi and Arduino were connected via UART.
V. METHODOLOGY The connection was a serial communication as Full Duplex
since there was two-ways that data could be transmitted via
A. Raspberry Pi
pin TX and RX.
Raspberry Pi [7] is a small computer board working on the A direct connection between the Raspberry Pi and Arduino
Linux operating system which connects to a computer was prohibited, because of its electrical potential differences,
monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Raspberry Pi can be applied to which is 3.3 volts for the Raspberry Pi and 5 volts for the
a electronic structure and programming network work, it can Arduino. Bi-directional Logic Level Converter should be used
also served as a personal computer and Apache Webserver, to separate them.
MySQL could be installed in the board.
A GPIO [10] pin can be used as either a digital input or a
digital output, and both operate at 3.3V. Unlike the Arduino,
the Raspberry Pi which does not have any analog inputs. For

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 connection, and Apache Webserver installation would be
conducted.

Fig.2: Bi-directional Logic Level Converter.

A connection between a camera and Raspberry Pi by

applying Common System Interface (CSI) serves as a point-
to-point connection, providing a fast data transmission and
low energy consumption.
MJPG-Streamer is a basic program command copying data
from a single input to multiple outputs. A photo could be
presented in a network system accessing from a web browser
on a computer. In this study, a photo from a camera would be
taken to demonstrate on a smart phone.
All sensors would be connected via Board Arduino and the
data would be transmitted from UART to Board Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi works as a controller of a ventilator, notifying a
working condition to the smart phone and served as a data
sender to store in a server computer.

Fig. 3: Shows the connection of the circuit.

G. Software
A connection between Raspberry Pi and smart phones was
investigated in this study. Programming of a communication Fig.4: Flowchart of the Python programming in Raspberry Pi.
between a server and a client consisted of two perspectives.
The Raspberry Pi would check whether there was any Python programming is applied for the development of
connected clients, if so, a mutual data transmission would be Raspberry Pi. Python would read the Arduino signal value via
done. By doing this, an application would send the data via UART and then collect the obtained signal to the database for
Socket referring to IP Address and Port in Transport Layer processing. If the value surpassed threshold, the over signal would
using TCP protocol. be sent to GPIO pins to aware the analog signal. In case of high
Linux was the main operating system used for Raspberry quality data, a “High” signal would be sent to GPIO pin 17 and the
IP. In this research, Raspbian Wheezy, an efficient operating ventilator would erase the internal air (Fan out on). In case of high
system confirmed by the producer, was installed on a SD Card temperature, a “High” signal would be sent to GPIO pin 27 and the
via Application Win32 Disk Manager. After the installation, ventilator would work automatically (Fan in on). In the event of
IP Address configuration, camera configuration, UART luminescence change, the data would be sent to GPIO pin 22 and
electric lamps would be opened. Conveniently, working of

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accessories could be customized by the user as mentioned in Fig. 4 Screen: Dashboard presents the value of the farm
expressing the flowchart of the Python programming in environment Spanning; current temperature, maximum-
Raspberry Pi. minimum temperature, moisture in the air, light, amount of
Another important thing is that this Smart Phone works methane, ammonia gas, and hydrogen sulfide gas.
with the Android OS. Developed applications are on the
Android operating system using the Java language and
interacted with the Raspberry Pi through the wireless network.
This will take the value from the Arduino to read displays
such as temperature, humidity, light, toxic gases, etc. It’s able
to control fans and lights, and can be tracked via the internet at
any time.

VI. EXPERIMENTAL AND RESULTS

In this paper, the model developed has led to a trial in the
environment and climate of a chicken farm, using the default
configuration notifications via Smart Phones.Shown in table 1
below.

TABLE 1.The default configuration notifications via

Smart Phones.

List Up to the Alert

CH4 50%
H2S 30%
NH3 50%
Fig. 6: Screen control system.
Maximum temperatures 30°C
Minimum temperature 25°C
Lighting 50%

According to figure 5: The display of the program first

allows the users to choose from 4 menus consisting of status,
camera control, work yourself, and set up alerts.

Fig.7: Screen self- image through the camera.

Shown in figure 6, the control system displays the controls of

lights and fans. By selecting Shutdown, the system will be
Fig. 5: Shows the main screen and the system status screen on
automatic and turn control the device by itself.
the Smart Phone.

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 The camera control screen will show the Farm in real VI. CONC
CLUSIONS
time. The embedded system is innovative
i for chicken farming,
which changes a traditional farm to a "Smart Farm" or
"Intelligent Farm". In additioon, the system could work on
applications of smart phones helping the farmers to control
and monitor real time envvironmental contexts such as
temperature, weather conditioon and quality, humidity, light

Ì New notificaation and filter fan switches. The inttelligent system can reduce cost,
time, and labor and is highly usser friendly for farmers.
In the coming future, Rasspberry Pi Model B should be
changed into Raspberry Pi 2 because of its more effectiveness
and server working reducction. All collected farming
information should be sent from m the server and stored in a new
system. Moreover, a livestock feeding system should be also
developed to make this a more complete system.
wledgment
Acknow
This study was supported by the Faculty of Information
Technology King Mongkut’s University
U of Technology North
Bangkok

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