IoT implementation for indoor vertical farming watering system

Abstract

Vertical farming is the practice of planting the plants in vertically stacked layers which optimize the land usage as it can be implemented in an indoor environment. The main idea of vertical farming is to use a controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) technology, where all environmental factors can be controlled. Therefore, in this project, an automatic system, which consists of the Internet of Thing [IoT] is implemented in providing the controlled environment for the vertical farming. The main purpose of this project is to build a system to monitor the soil moisture and to control water content through the web browser on the laptop, mobile phone and other handheld and compact devices. In this project, a soil moisture sensor is used to detect the moisture or water content of the soil in the vertical farm so that the plant can be consecutively monitored and controlled to have enough water. When low moisture level is detected, the signals are sent to the Arduino platform. Then, the data is stored eventually in the Arduino IDE software and simultaneously sent to the web browser through the Ethernet that is connected to the internet router. The user can monitor their plant through the web browser that allows them to read the status of the soil moisture and can control the water valve to release the water to the plant whenever the reading is low or necessary. With this development, the monitoring of the vertical farming has been so helpful and the growth of the plant can be supervised from time to time without having the operator at the event.