Wireless Sensor Network Based Soil Moisture Monitoring System Design
Wen-Yaw Chung, Jocelyn F. Villaverde, Janine Tan
Citation: Position Papers of the 2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 1, pages 79–82 (2013)
Abstract. Soil moisture is the amount of water in the soil. It plays a crucial role for efficient photosynthesis, respiration, transpiration and transportation of minerals and other nutrients through the plant. Proper irrigation schedule is very critical to plant growth. This paper presents a soil moisture monitoring system which comprises of commercially available soil moisture sensor Decagon EC-5, low power nRF24L01 wireless transceiver, and MPC82G516A microcontroller. The sensed soil moisture content from the EC-5 sensor node will be transmitted to the coordinator via 2.5GHZ wireless signal. The coordinator will transmit the data to the computer using RS232 interface. The key components used in the proposed system are low cost and more flexible. The locally developed MPC82G516A microcontroller consumes low power due to its 1-T instruction time. In addition, the EC-5 sensing electrode also has advantages of easy installation and replacement in the farm. The developed system provides a better data transmitted and processed wirelessly and it can serve as a basis for efficient irrigation scheduling.