AUTOMATIC PLANT WATERING SYSTEM DEPENDING ON SOIL CONDITION
ABSTRACT
Irrigation is the art of applying water to the plants/ fields to grow and to increase
the quantity as well as quality of the fruits, food grains etc., Automatic irrigation
system is a modern method of irrigating the vegetable, fruit fields, farms, gardens
and land scaping areas as against the conventional method, which uses large
number of men- hours and uncontrolled water quantity. This modern drip irrigation
method has the advantage of precisely applying water for irrigation in both location
and point, thus offering the potential of increased profit due to Reduced water.
This project work describes about “Automatic Plant Watering System
depending on soil condition” designed with micro- controller. The main
purpose of the project work is to apply water to the plants automatically, by
sensing the soil condition. For sensing the soil condition, weather it is dry or
wet, copper electrodes are used as soil sensors and output of these sensors are
fed to the microcontroller. The output of microcontroller is used to drive the
motor, for this purpose relay is used. These are electrically controlled valves,
when the particular plant soil found to be dry, automatically the controller
energizes that particular plant relay and supply water to that plant. Provision
is made for LCD panel, such that condition of the soil can be displayed.
In addition to the above, the system is designed to monitor the water level in
overhead water tank.
1. INTRODUCTION
In India agriculture is the most important occupation of the people. More
than 60% of our total population depends for their subsistence on agriculture.
After independence due to various development projects introduced in the field
agriculture, production of food grains has been continuously increasing. The
entire Indian economy is depends on agriculture. Any fluctuation in agriculture
income will directly affect the India’s national income. In this regard, a thought
is given to develop an Automatic Plant Watering System Depending On Soil
condition designed with micro-controller.
Irrigation engineering comprises of a full knowledge of sources of irrigation
water, their proper preservation and application of this water to the land after
conveying it from the source through an irrigation system, consisting of canal and
connected works. It also includes a working knowledge of different types of soils
and the water requirements of various crops sown in them.
In this project work lot of importance is given for the drip irrigation, such that by
sensing the soil humidity water supply can be controlled automatically. For sensing
the soil condition copper electrodes are used.
Irrigation is usually required when the yearly rainfall is either insufficient or ill
distributed or ill timed. Yield is much better where irrigation is practiced and fields
are watered at the proper time. In countries like India and Egypt, irrigation
provides employment for large sections of people. It raises the standard of living
and prosperity. Irrigation projects are successful only when sufficient quantities of
water are available and the land is suitable to grow remunerative crops. No
irrigation is normally required if the total annual rainfall is 100cms. Or more and
takes place at correct times. When it is proposed to grow valuation and better types

of crops like Rice, Sugar cane, Vegetables, Cotton etc., Irrigation is very essential.
This project work, in addition to the controlling of pumping motor, it is also
aimed to control the overhead tank automatically, for this purpose the controller
circuit is designed with micro-controller. With the advancement of technology in
the electronics. Particularly in the Hybrid electronics and Microelectronics, the
electronics has entered in to each and every field, whether it is a communication
electronics or control electronics or computer electronics. To make more innovative
and more comfortable for modern drip irrigation, it is decided to develop a project
in plant watering automation.
In this project work, micro-controller chip is playing a major role, the controller
used in this project is PIC16F877, and this is 40pin IC having 33 /O lines.
Nowadays with the advancement of technology in the field of micro-controllers, all
the activities in our day-to-day living have become part of information technology
and we find micro-controllers in each and every application. Thus, the trend is
directing towards controller based project works. However in this project work, the
basic signal processing of information gathering from the soil and water tank
condition, is done with analog circuit, for this purpose copper electrodes are used for
sensing the soil condition.
By implementing this kind of monitoring and control systems for the agriculture
purpose, each and every field can be automated. However in this project work micro-
controller is used just as a controller in controlling various relays. In this project a
relay is connected at the output of the controller, which energizes or de-energizes
automatically according to the received information from the copper electrodes.
Before we go into concept of field automation first we have to define automation.
The term Automation refers to means of control of electrical and mechanical
operations without human interference. Definition of automation can be extended to
field Automation which states that “monitoring and control of various electrical
equipments used for modern drip irrigation to their predetermined levels without
human interference”. In real time application with one micro-controller we can
process large number of micro-controller or other IC device to be tailored to
implement a specific function. The application program executed by a micro-
controller drives the system hardware in order to implement the desired system .
function for a given micro-controller, different application programs allow different
systems function to be implemented within a range limited by the available system
2.LITERATURE SURVEY
In our literature survey we found that the prevoiys versions of the current
project had major drawbacks.the problem with the previous versions was that they
had only provision for automatic plant watering and they were unable to detect the
soil condition.which was a huge drawback.the previous models could not
implement the drip irrigation system.and they did not have a autonatic tank level
controlling in order to eliminate all the above said problems we designed amoduele
considering the above situation
3.THEROTICAL ANLAYSIS
3.1 BLOCK DIAGRAM AND ITS BRIEF DESPRIPTION
The block diagram and its brief description of the project work “Automatic Plant
Watering System Depending On Soil Condiotion” is explained in brief. The
complete block diagram of the project work is shown at the end of this chapter. The
description is as follows.
LCD FOR DISPLAY: Liquid Crystal Display has been used for monitoring the soil
condition, which displays weather the soil is dry or wet. LCD is preferred because of
its lightweight and low power consumption compared to LED’s or Fluorescent
displays. The LCD is interfaced to the micro-controller. To character that is displayed
will be stored in the Micro-controller prior to the display.
A Liquid Crystal Display is a parallel plate capacitor with dielectric patterns in the
photo resist. These patterns can be segments of numeric digits or they can be
icons/patterns that represent various functions. LCD consists of two substrates that
form a ‘flat bottle’ containing the liquid crystal mixture. The inside surfaces of the
bottle or cell are coated with a polymer that is buffed (surface which is finished with
lines) to align the molecules of liquid crystal. The liquid crystal molecules align on the
surface in the direction of buffing. In the present module 16-bit length LCD is used i.e.,
the message can be 16 characters maximum at a time.32-bit or more LCD can be used
in future for enhancing the text length.
MICRO-CONTROLLER
Microcontroller chip includes a microprocessor as well as some often peripherals. A
controller is used to control some process or aspect of environment. A typical
microcontroller application is monitoring of my house. As the temperature rises, the
controller causes the windows to open. If the temperature goes the above a certain
threshold, the sir conditioner is activated. As the process of miniaturization continued,
all the components needed for controller were built right onto one chip. A one chip
computer or microcontroller was born. A microcontroller is a highly integrated chip
which includes, on one chip, all or most of the parts needed for the controller. The
microcontroller could be called a “one-chip solution”. It typically includes CPU,
EPROM/PROM/ROM, I/O devices (serial, parallel, ADC, DAC etc) , Timers, Interrupt
controller.
icrocontroller come in many flavors and varieties. Depending on the power and
features that are needed, you might choose a 4 bit, 8 bit, 16 bit or 32 bit
microcontroller. In addition, some specialized versions are available which include
features specific for communications, keyboard handling,signal processing, video
processing,and other tasks. Today’s microcontrollers are fast,cheap and low power
machines that can handle just about any control or data processing application
imaginable. However, with the wide array of microcontroller offerings available from
over 25 manucacturers, it can be difficult to keep up with the features, market, theory,
and terminology involved with the microcontroller world. With so many manufacturers
now producing
Micro-controller unit is constructed with PIC16F877 Micro-controller chip. The
PIC16F877 is a low power, higher performance CMOS 8-bit microcomputer with
programme memory size14K bytes 368 bytes of RAM and 256 bytes of EEPROM.