A Raspberry Pi-Powered IoT Smart Farming System for Efficient Water Irrigation and Crop Monitoring

Abstract

Water irrigation remain as a challenge to supply adequate amount of water to sustain the growth of plant and crops yield along the year in certain part of the world which are heavily affected by climate change. This scenario creates a huge risk toward the world food supply chain. Hence, the application of smart farming system is crucially important now to pave the way for a better the agriculture monitoring system to replace traditional manual monitoring labour by farmers. The smart farming system are usually equipped with environmental stimuli sensing system such as temperature, humidity, soil moisture, light intensity sensing sensors coupled with automation actuators to control the water irrigation rate for the crops in order to save water and at the same time provide adequate water supply for plant growth. The aim of using such smart farming system is to enable higher crops production and less human labour at the same time optimising resources available to minimize cost of farming. Hence, this paper aims to introduce a novel approach of a Raspberry Pi powered IoT smart farming system (ISFS) which can incorporate autonomous monitoring of plant irrigation, temperature, humidity, soil moisture and light intensity, to design a smartphone app that allows users to monitor plantation-related conditions in a user-friendly manner, and to enable automatic control of a drip irrigation system for plants based on data obtained on soil moisture, temperature and sunlight intensity. The proposed prototype with the functionality mentioned is aim to resolve the existing problem and to meet the demand of smart farming application in current era.