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IoT Based Irrigation System Powered by Solar Energy

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 IoT Based Irrigation System Powered by Solar
Energy
Nagaraja Rao S, Kiran Kumar B. M., Mahesh M, Himanshu Mishra, Raviteja K.
Faculty of Engineering and Technology, M.S. Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, Bengaluru
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract
Irrigation of the agricultural sector is a major problem facing most farmers now a days. The problems associated with
irriagation are over-irrigation, under-irrigation and manual labour. This paper presents a solar powered IoT(Internet od
Things) based irrigation system for paddy fields to have an insightful approach for overcoming labour-intensive work and
also to track the water management system. The mian aim is to diminish conventional methods of irrigation and support an
intelligent way of watering the paddy fileds to conserve water and limit the over or under irriagation. The system is designed
to be powered by a photovoltaic panel that enables smooth operation even during power cuts. The microcontroller is the
heart of the device. Two microcontrollers are used to process the data, one of which is integrated with a humidity sensor, a
temperature sensor and a humidity sensor. The inputs from these sensors are fed to the first microcontroller and these values
are used to activate a solenoid valve that starts irrigation on the basis of soil moisture requirements. The output of the fisrt
microcontroller is also fed to the second microcontroller unit, and the data is fed to the ThingSpeak platform, a cloud server
powered by Mathworks. Thus, the irrigation cycle takes place without human intervention and can be tracked remotely from
any part of the world.
KeyWords: Arduino, Humidity, Internet of Things, Irrigation, ThingSpeak, Temperature

1. INTRODUCTION
Agriculture plays an important role in our country's
growth. Problems related to agricultural often methods that strengthen the proper irrigation
hamper the economy [1]. The population of India system. Also, to utilize the abundantly available
has reached 1.3 billion, and is rising day by day. At solar energy as a source of energy to the proposed
the current pace, significant problems will emerge concept also contributes to uninterrupted running
with food shortages and water consumption. Also, of the process.
the farmers now use an age-old methodology for The researchers have proposed various automatic
irrigation for paddy that is known to be ineffective irrigation system based on GSM and SPRS in the
[2]. To date most farmers have been using past decade [6-11]. The major drawbacks of the
conventional farming irrigation techniques. proposed systems are automated drip system is
Particularly for paddy, where they use a technique very sensitive to clogging, costly and human error
known as flood irrigation in which water is left in setting the control values.
standing during the growing season. Nearly 50%
2. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
of the water percolates into the soil and another
20% evaporates and the remaining 30% is what the The proposed system is designed to power by solar
crop needs. This paper focuses primarily on energy. The charge controller is used between the
addressing the problem of over-irrigation, under- battery and the solar panel to prevent the power
irrigation and manual labour. In addition it saves from flowing back to the panel, to regulate the
the farmer's time, money and electric energy. power flow and the circuit will also prevent the
Knowledge in electronics and computing has been battery from being overcharged. The energy is fed
used in recent years to solve most of the challenges from the charge controller into the entire device.
in agriculture [3-5]. The microcontroller had been The system is further divided into two major units
at the forefront of the electronics revolution. namely control unit and receiving unit
Together with various sensors the microcontroller
a. Control Unit
is used to calculate and monitor physical quantities
such as temperature, humidity, heat and light. The control unit is the heart of the system. It
This paper proposes an IoT-based paddy irrigation consists of an Arduino UNO which has Atmel320p
system powered by solar energy, A clever micro-controller and it acts as the brain of the
approach for managing labor intensive work and system thereby controlling all the devices
even for regulating water management systems. connected to it [12-15]. The YL-69 soil moisture
The key objective is to reduce traditional watering sensor, DHT-11 humidity and temperature sensor,
methods and to encourage genuine water use 5V single channel and 12V solenoid valve is

SASTech Journal 13 Vol. 19, Issue 2

connected to the Arduino. The Arduino gets data of
the soil moisture content, humidity and
temperature from the soil and this data is used to
compare with a prefixed threshold value. If the
values obtained from the soil do not fall within the
designed constrained value, the micro-controller
triggers the solenoid valve with the help of the relay
connected. Also this Arduino sends data to the
receiving unit through the Nrf24l01. The
components used in control unit are given in
Table.1 Fig. 2 Connection diagram of control unit
Table 1. Components used in Control unit
SI No Component
1 Arduino uno
2 NRF24l01
3 Solenoid valve
4 DHT11 sensor
5 YL-69 soil moisture sensor
6 Relay
7 Batteries 12V 1.3A/h, and 9V Fig. 3 Circuit Connection of Control Unit on the
b. Receiving unit Breadboard

This unit consists of an Arduino which receives

data using the nRF24l01. This data is later sent to
ThingSpeak platform using the ESP8266 module.
The architecture of the suggested system is shown
in the Fig.1, it mainly consist of control unit and
receiving unit as discussed.

Fig.4 Circuit Diagram for the Receiving Unit

Fig. 1 Architecture of the proposed design

The connection diagram of the control unit and its
implementation on the breadboard are depicted in Fig. 5 Circuit Connection of Receiving Unit on the
the Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 respectively. Breadboard

The connection diagram of the receiving unit and

its implementation on the breadboard are shown in
the Fig. 4 and 5 respectively. The receiving unit
consists of an Arduino, an nRF24l01, an ESP8266
and batteries. The receiving unit is kept near the
farmer's home.

SASTech Journal 14 Vol. 19, Issue 2

3. HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION charge controller circuit ensures that the batteries of the
deep cycle are not overloaded during the day and that the
The operational diagram for the proposed system is
power is not running overnight back to the solar panels
shown Fig. 6 and draining the batteries. The circuit diagram of solar
charge controller is shown in Fig. 8

Fig. 6 Operational diagram for the system Fig. 8 Solar cell voltage regulator circuit diagram

As shown in Fig. 6 it can be seen that the given threshold The charge controller uses a LM317 voltage regulator.
value for the triggering action of the actuators are The LM317 is a three-terminal positive voltage regulator
specified. If the soil moisture percentage or temperature that can produce more than 1.5A over a voltage output
of soil drops below the threshold value, the solenoid range of 1.25 V to 37 V. Setting the output voltage only
valve is triggered, else it doesn't irrigate the field. And requires two external resistors. It includes current
simultaneously the data will be transferred to the restricting, defense against thermal overload and safe
internet. Prototype of the proposed model is shown in defense of operating area. The specifications of the
Fig. 7 circuit is shown in Table. 2
In the proposed model, main control unit senses moisture
content and soil temperature. A fixed value is used as Table 2. Specifications of the circuit
reference to trigger the solenoid valve. If the temperature Parameter Value
is 400c and humidity is 50%, the irrigation starts. The Output voltage 1.25 - 37V
relay coil gets a signal from Arduino to trigger the Voltage differential 3 - 40V
solenoid valve. Assuming the water is present in the tank, Operating temperature 0-125 °C
the water starts flowing through the valve. Further, after Max. output current 1.5 A
some time, once the moisture content reached 100% and Min. load current 3.5 to 1 mA
temperature dropped to 300C, the process stops
Thermal resistance 80 °C/W
immediately. The process repeats itself again and again.
Thermal resistance 4 °C/W
Simultaneously the moisture percentage, temperature
and humidity will be transferred to the ThingSpeak
platform through the nRF24L01 for monitoring purpose. ThingSpeak Platform
ThingSpeak platform is free web server and a web page
run by MATLAB. This platform receives information
from devices linked to the internet. And then the website
shows the data in the form of graphs. The homepage of
the ThingSpeak Platform is as shown in Fig. 9.

Fig.9 ThingSpeak platform

It is required to create an ID here, and then to request for

a API key. The API key is unique key which helps in
Fig. 7 Experimental setup of proposed system sending data to their platform. In the proposed system the
Solar charge controller circuit Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used for sending
Solar charge controller is a tool used to regulate voltage data. It is also required use their IP addresses to send data
or current, and to avoid overloading of the battery. The to their server.

SASTech Journal 15 Vol. 19, Issue 2

 Formulation and Testing
Calibration of YL-69 a Chinese make soil moisture
sensor is carried out in the paper. It is done by measuring
the soil moisture value when the soil is dry. Then small
amount of water is added in successions to plot the graph
of the curve. A map the obtained values for the usage in
the program. Experimental configuration of the proposed
scheme is shown in Fig. 10. Materials required for testing
is show in Tbale.3.

Fig. 11 Soil Moisture Sensor reading vs soil Content

As shown in Fig. 11 it is evident that the soil moisture
sensor readings are similar for different types of soil. So
we can assume that-
0% − −> 915
100% − −> 290

Thus setting minimum value as 915 and maximum value

as 290, it can be mapped for each value obtaining the
required result in percentage.
The obtained data is transferred to the ThingSpeak
platform at the baud rate of 115200. The three parameters
transferred to ThingSpeak is shown in the Fig. 12, the
Fig.10 Experimental Setup protocol used and the API key for our field used can be
seen.
Table 3. Material required

Si No. Material Quantity

1 Burette 1
2 Black soil and red soil 250gms
3 Arduino UNO 1
4 Soil moisture sensor 1

4. RESULTS
The water is poured into the burette and placed on the
stand as shown in the Fig. 10. Sensor of soil moisture is
put in the soil and positioned under the burette stand. The
Arduino is programmed with the code necessary for
processing and open the valve of the burette. Small
amount of water is allowed to pour as per the changes in
readings. Finally the results are tabulated as shown in
Table. 4 and plotted on the graph as shown in Fig. 11.
Fig. 12 Data transferred to ThingSpeak platform
Table 4. Readings of soil moisture sensor
The temperature, humidity and soil moisture being
Sl Volume Reading of Reading of transferred to the ThinSpeak platform. The time of the
No of water soil moisture soil data transfer can also be noted from the graphs. The data
(mL) sensor for moisture is uploaded four times in a minute. It can be changed by
Black soil sensor for increasing or decreasing the delay in the program. Thus
red soil we can monitor the changes happening in the field using
1 0 913 917 this system. Also this system being automatic, it reduces
2 2 496 589 labour issues. The other main advantage of using this
3 6 355 400 system is that we don't need internet connectivity in the
4 20 326 350 field like other existing technology. It just needs Wi-Fi
in the home of the farmer.
5 25 307 308
6 30 292 293 5. CONCLUSIONS
7 40 290 290
This paper proposed the issues related to irrigation
system and an innovative method to solve the problems
faced by farmers. Over irrigation and under irrigation is

SASTech Journal 16 Vol. 19, Issue 2

 one of the major problems faced by paddy cultivators. [9] Gutiérrez, J., Villa-Medina, J.F., Nieto-Garibay, A.
The proposed system has emphasized on the usage of and Porta-Gándara, M.Á., 2013. Automated
drip irrigation which according to the above discussion irrigation system using a wireless sensor network
is known to improve the yield by up to 50%, save up to and GPRS module. IEEE transactions on
70% of water and also save energy as this is system is instrumentation and measurement, 63(1), pp.166-
powered by solar energy. It has also proved that with the 176.
usage of drip irrigation combined with sensors and IoT it
can further improve the yield especially in the case of sub [10] Saraf, S.B. and Gawali, D.H., 2017, May. IoT based
surfaced drip irrigation which must require a monitoring smart irrigation monitoring and controlling system.
system. The proposed system also turns out to be In 2017 2nd IEEE International Conference on
effective when the area of the field becomes large, as Recent Trends in Electronics, Information &
irrigating and monitoring large fields usually takes large Communication Technology (RTEICT) (pp. 815-
amount of time and energy. This system can help save 819). IEEE.
the time, money, power and water crises of the farmer. [11] Divani, D., Patil, P. and Punjabi, S.K., 2016, April.
Automated plant Watering system. In 2016
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT Energy Information and Commuincation (ICCPEIC)
Authors would like to express their sincere thanks to the (pp. 180-182). IEEE.
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the facilities needed to carry out this research work.
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