Technologies for biodegradable wireless plant monitoring sensors

Abstract

A monitoring system to early detect adverse plant crowing conditions is developed as a first attempt, and laboratory samples are available. The hardware part of the system consists of a wireless sensor network to gather and transfer the data, a data gateway to collect data and bring it to the internet and a central server running an expert system. For practical use, the sensors are fabricated from materials that are biodegradable or inert with a minimum amount of metal and ceramic and allow for remaining them on the field when harvesting. The sensors detect temperature, soil moisture and, in the near future the leaf wetness and nitrate. Single-chip controllers which include radio communication interfaces are used on printed circuit boards made partly of conventional PCB material and of biodegradable substrate printing of the wiring and of the communication antennas. A biodegradable zinc-manganese dioxide battery was applied for powering of the sensor nodes. The advance of the new forecast system is that the sensors are cheap and degradable which make it possible to monitor micro-climate on an even significantly higher dense scale at lower effort and low price by the professionals. This allows for site-specific treatment, and thus makes it possible to lower the plant protection agents application even more within the field scale.