Aris Munandar, Hanif Fakhrurroja, Irfan F. A.

Anto, Rian Putra Pratama, Joni Winaryo Wibowo,

Taufik Ibnu Salim,

and Muhammad Ilham Rizqyawan

Technical Implementation Unit for Instrumentation Development

Indonesian Institute of Sciences

Bandung, Indonesia

[email protected]

Abstract— One of the main issues of human civilization is how

to fulfill the food needs. Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) of the United Nations predicted that in 2050 the world
population will grow to 9.1 billion people. It means that food
production needs to be raised by 70% between 2005 and 2050 in
order to feed a world population of 9.1 billion people. UN also
predicts that 60% of the global population will live in urban
areas by 2030. This will lead to the expansion of the metropolitan
area of the city and conversely the reduction of agricultural land.
On the other hand, the development of technology in the area of
IT leads to the appearance of technology called the Internet of
Things (IoT). In this paper, we present the design, development,
and implementation of our preliminary research about the smart
hydroponic system using the IoT concept to connect it to the
cloud server.
Keywords—internet of things; smart farming; hydroponics;
I. I NTRODUCTION
One of the main issues of human civilization is how to
fulfill the food needs. Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) of the United Nations predicted that in 2050 the world
population will grow to 9.1 billion people. It means that food
production needs to be raised by 70% between 2005 and 2050
in order to feed a world population of 9.1 billion people [1].
UN also predicts that 60% of the global population will live
in urban areas by 2030 [2]. This will lead to the expansion of
the metropolitan area of the city and conversely the reduction
of agricultural land. Hydroponic farming arises to address this
problem. This urban agriculture model allows people to use
their space of land or building for agriculture purpose, even if
they only have small areas.
On the other hand, the development of technology in the
area of IT leads to the appearance of technology called the
Internet of Things (IoT). This technology enables other
existing technology to be used in a much broader area. IoT
enables the communication between machines, both in the
local area or in the remote places by using the internet as the
medium. The user can also monitor their sensors remotely
using this technology. With all this advantages and
opportunities created by this technology, IoT received a lot of
attention both from industry and academia. Researchers and
engineers begin to apply this technology, along with Wireless
Sensor Network (WSN) technology [26-28], to diverse field
area such as health care [3-5], transportation [6-8], surveillance
[29-30], smart home [9-11], smart city [12-14], and agriculture
[15-17].
This paper describes an application prototype for smart
hydroponic using an IoT cloud platform. The first section
describes the introduction of the study. Section two will
describe the related works conducted by other researchers.
Section three will be describing the design of the system.
Implementation and result will be covered in section four. Then
the conclusion will be presented in section five.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
This research focuses on designing and developing the IoT-
based smart hydroponic system. The global steps of this
research can be seen in the following list:
• System Development
• Integration
For the system development methodology, we use the Agile
method [26]. Agile method was chosen in order to develop a
working prototype as soon as possible by minimizing the
planning process and focusing on the iterative process of
development. Agile model can be seen in fig. 1.

IV. SYSTEM D ESIGN

A. System Architecture
In our system, there are three main blocks that build the
system. The first one is the node. The node is the bundle of
sensors and actuator which planted in and interacts with the
hydroponic system. The second block is the API and backend
server. This block acts as the gateway for both node and the
next block which is front-end application. Front-end
application is used as the interface between the system and
users, either via computer or smartphone. The block diagram of
the system architecture can be seen in Fig.2.
We use Open Garden as our data acquisition module. Then
we serialized the data from Open Garden and transfer it to
WiFi module to be sent to the Cloud Server. ESP 8266 is used
as the WiFi module of our system.
B. Application Programming Interface (API)
The API acts as a gateway of communication between
nodes, front-end app, and mobile app. We use Representational
State Transfer (REST) as an architectural style for the API. In
general, the API of this system can be categorized as follows:
• Sensors
o Sensor node
o Single sensor data
• Actuators
o Actuator node
• Single actuator
• Application
o Generic application data
The backend of the API is built on top of the PHP-
CodeIgniter stack. MySQL is used as the database management
system. According to [24] MySQL performance is only falling
behind to MongoDB in write performance. But MySQL is
better in size required to store the data, which required a
smaller amount of disk space. Javascript Object Notation
(JSON) is used as the format of data exchange between the API
and nodes/app. To get the sensors information of certain node,
we use GET method with following URL:
/iot_api/sensor?sd_id=[node id]. The JSON format of sensor
node API can be seen in the following code:
[
{
"ss_id": "xxxxxx1",
"ss_name": "sensor 1",
"ss_description": "Sensor 1 description",
"ss_unit": "point",
"ss_creation_date": "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:ss",
"ss_last_activity":
" YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:ss ",
"sd_id": " xxxxxxa1"
},
…
{
"ss_id": " xxxxxxn",
"ss_nama": " Sensor n",
"ss_description": " Sensor n description ",
"ss_unit": "°C",
"ss_creation_date": " YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:ss ",
"ss_last_activity":
" YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:ss ",
"sd_id": " xxxxxxan"
},
]
As we can see, the API returns the information of sensors in
the form of an array. The array contains the object of sensors in
the selected node. To get the data of selected sensor, we use
GET method with following URL:
/iot_api/sensordata?ss_id=[sensor id]. The JSON format of
sensor data API can be seen in the following code:
{
"name":"pH",
"unit":"point",
"status":"success",
"category": ["YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:ss", "YYYY-MM-DD
HH:MM:ss", "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:ss", "YYYY-MM-DD
HH:MM:ss", " YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:ss",
"data": [(float) x, x, x, x, x],
"last_data ": {
"datetime": "DD MM YYYY - HH:MM:ss ",
"value": (float) x
}
}
C. Front-end Applications
There are two kinds of front-end application we built for
this system. The first one is the front-end web application. This
web app basically extends the system of the API with the
addition of the views module. This app relies heavily on
Javascript to display the data to the user. The other one is the
mobile application. The app is developed for the Android
smartphone platform, allowing the user to monitor and control
the hydroponic from their smartphone. The app is developed
using MIT app inventor, a tool for developing an android app
without having to actually code the program, but instead using
a block-like visual object as the logic program. This tool allows
us to prototype the android app quickly.
V. I MPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS
The design then developed into a working prototype of the
system. Fig. 3 shows the physical view of the developed
prototype. Fig. 4 shows the prototype of the node hardware
which contains sensors and data acquisition module.
The screenshot of the frontend web app can be seen in fig.
5 below. The app dashboard shows the chart of each sensors
data at a certain interval. The number of data displayed can be
set by selecting the desired length of data in the combo box
provided. Fig. 6 and fig. 7 shows the chart from the pH and
light intensity sensors.
The dashboard of the Android mobile app is shown in Fig.
8, containing a chart for sensors data, including pH, water
temperature, air temperature, air humidity, light intensity, and
conductivity. The red bar in the chart shows that the current
level of condition measured by the sensor is not optimal. So a
certain action of control in the actuator needs to be made in
order to make the condition is optimal for the plants (shown by
the green bar).

VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented design, development, and
implementation of our preliminary research about a smart
hydroponic system using the IoT concept to connect it to the
cloud server. Open Garden is used as our data acquisition
module. The data from Open Garden is serialized and then
transferred to WiFi module to be sent to the Cloud Server.
From there the data can be displayed in the web using front-
end web app or in the smartphone using the android app. After
testing, the system is work as intended and ready to use. As
future work, we plan to develop a smart model based on the
data obtained from this system. This model could be used as
the decision for controlling the actuator or as the insight for the
user by providing some trends or large scale prediction based
on the data.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by the thematic program
through the Bandung Technical Management Unit for
Instrumentation Development (Deputy for Scientific Services).