Smart Internet of Things Modular Micro Grow Room Architecture

Abstract

This article proposes the Internet of Things-based self-sustaining modular grow room architecture for optimising the seed germination and seedling development process. The architecture is scalable and flexible as it can be adapted to particular environments, scopes, requirements and plant types; it is modular as the host room can contain one or more smaller-scale grow rooms, each of them controlling their own micro-environment independently. One of the main goals of the research was to develop such a system that could be deployed efficiently, with minimal costs and energy footprint, which would enable its practical usage primarily in private self-sustainable households. The usage of widely available and inexpensive components, open source code, and free cloud services all enabled us to reach such a goal. Besides simple automation mostly described by existing solutions, the architecture proposed within this article offers remote control and data processing and visualisation, data trend tracking, smart optimisation, and actuator control, and event notifications.