03-05-2011, 09:14 AM
Submitted by:
Amit Radhakrishnan
Poonam Bansal
Prabhat Kumar
Smitha P.
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SYNOPSIS
Appropriate environmental conditions are necessary for optimum plant growth, improved
crop yields, and efficient use of water and other resources. Automating the data acquisition
process of the soil conditions and various climatic parameters that govern plant growth allows
information to be collected at high frequency with less labor requirements. The existing systems
employ PC or SMS-based systems for keeping the user continuously informed of the conditions
inside the greenhouse; but are unaffordable, bulky, difficult to maintain and less accepted by the
technologically unskilled workers.
The objective of this project is to design a simple, easy to install, microcontroller-based
circuit to monitor and record the values of temperature, humidity, soil moisture and sunlight of
the natural environment that are continuously modified and controlled in order optimize them to
achieve maximum plant growth and yield. The controller used is a low power, cost efficient chip
manufactured by ATMEL having 8K bytes of on-chip flash memory. It communicates with the
various sensor modules in real-time in order to control the light, aeration and drainage process
efficiently inside a greenhouse by actuating a cooler, fogger, dripper and lights respectively
according to the necessary condition of the crops. An integrated Liquid crystal display (LCD) is
also used for real time display of data acquired from the various sensors and the status of the
various devices. Also, the use of easily available components reduces the manufacturing and
maintenance costs. The design is quite flexible as the software can be changed any time. It can
thus be tailor-made to the specific requirements of the user.
This makes the proposed system to be an economical, portable and a low maintenance
solution for greenhouse applications, especially in rural areas and for small scale agriculturists
INTRODUCTION
We live in a world where everything can be controlled and operated automatically,
but there are still a few important sectors in our country where automation has not been
adopted or not been put to a full-fledged use, perhaps because of several reasons one such
reason is cost. One such field is that of agriculture. Agriculture has been one of the primary
occupations of man since early civilizations and even today manual interventions in farming
are inevitable. Greenhouses form an important part of the agriculture and horticulture sectors
in our country as they can be used to grow plants under controlled climatic conditions for
optimum produce. Automating a greenhouse envisages monitoring and controlling of the
climatic parameters which directly or indirectly govern the plant growth and hence their
produce. Automation is process control of industrial machinery and processes, thereby
replacing human operators.
1.1 CURRENT SCENARIO
Greenhouses in India are being deployed in the high-altitude regions where the subzero
temperature up to -40° C makes any kind of plantation almost impossible and in arid
regions where conditions for plant growth are hostile. The existing set-ups primarily are:
1.1.1 MANUAL SET-UP:
This set-up involves visual inspection of the plant growth, manual irrigation of plants,
turning ON and OFF the temperature controllers, manual spraying of the fertilizers and
pesticides. It is time consuming, vulnerable to human error and hence less accurate and
unreliable.
1.1.2 PARTIALLY AUTOMATED SET-UP:
This set-up is a combination of manual supervision and partial automation and is
similar to manual set-up in most respects but it reduces the labor involved in terms of
irrigating the set-up.
1.1.3 FULLY- AUTOMATED:
This is a sophisticated set-up which is well equipped to react to most of the climatic
changes occurring inside the greenhouse. It works on a feedback system which helps it to
respond to the external stimuli efficiently. Although this set-up overcomes the problems
caused due to human errors it is not completely automated and expensive.
1.2 PROBLEM DEFINITION
A number of problems associated with the above mentioned systems are enumerated
as below:
1. Complexity involved in monitoring climatic parameters like humidity, soil moisture,
illumination, soil pH, temperature, etc which directly or indirectly govern the plant
growth.
2. Investment in the automation process are high, as today’s greenhouse control systems are
designed for only one parameter monitoring (as per GKVK research center); to control
more than one parameter simultaneously there will be a need to buy more than one
system.
3. High maintenance and need for skilled technical labor. The modern proposed systems use
the mobile technology as the communication schemes and wireless data acquisition
systems, providing global access to the information about one’s farms. But it suffers from
various limitations like design complexity, inconvenient repairing and high price. Also
the reliability of the system is relatively low, and when there are malfunctions in local
devices, all local and tele data will be lost and hence the whole system collapses. More
over farmers in India do not work under such sophisticated environment and find no
necessity of such an advanced system, and cannot afford the same.
Keeping these issues in view, a microcontroller based monitoring and control system is
designed to find implementation in the near future that will help Indian farmers.
1.3 PROPOSED MODEL FOR AUTOMATION OF GREENHOUSE
The proposed system is an embedded system which will closely monitor and control
the microclimatic parameters of a greenhouse on a regular basis round the clock for
cultivation of crops or specific plant species which could maximize their production over the
whole crop growth season and to eliminate the difficulties involved in the system by reducing
human intervention to the best possible extent. The system comprises of sensors, Analog to
Digital Converter, microcontroller and actuators.
When any of the above mentioned climatic parameters cross a safety threshold which
has to be maintained to protect the crops, the sensors sense the change and the
microcontroller reads this from the data at its input ports after being converted to a digital
form by the ADC. The microcontroller then performs the needed actions by employing relays
until the strayed-out parameter has been brought back to its optimum level. Since a
microcontroller is used as the heart of the system, it makes the set-up low-cost and effective
nevertheless. As the system also employs an LCD display for continuously alerting the user
about the condition inside the greenhouse, the entire set-up becomes user friendly.
Thus, this system eliminates the drawbacks of the existing set-ups mentioned in the
previous section and is designed as an easy to maintain, flexible and low cost solution.
