Abstract:
Over one third of world workforce are employed in agriculture and the amount is steadily falling because of the financial losses of the farmers. One of the key reason behind this financial loss is the lack of technology in agriculture. Continuous cropping and overuse of fertilizers cause the decline in soil productivity and effect the environment as well. This paper demonstrates how the soil productivity can be optimized by implementing an IoT (Internet of Things) based model. Specifically, the paper describes the way to identify the amount of soil nutrients and environmental conditions, followed by the recommendations for cropping and site specific fertilization. Nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium are the key nutrients that are responsible for the plant growth. Soil moisture, pH level of soil and environmental conditions also effects the productivity of crops. In this present work, the system incorporated with various chemicals and sensors to report NPK level, pH level, soil moisture level, temperature and weather forecast. The proposed system takes the soil sample as the input and performs the chemical reactions, corresponding changes in the color of sample is sensed by color sensors and decoded by colorimetry technique.
components.
1)Arduino Mega Microcontroller
2)Color Sensor
3) TCS3200 Color Sensor
4)Soil Moisture Sensor
5)GPS NEO – 6M
6) GPS
CIRCUIT DIAGRAM
Block Diagram The proposed system comprises of NPK and pH testing chemicals, color sensors, soil moisture sensor, temperature sensor, GPS, Arduino mega and an android application
Arduino Mega Microcontroller
Arduino is a computer hardware and microcontroller board. It is based on Microcontroller ATmega 2560. It is equipped with 54 digital I/O pins and 16 analog pins [8]. In Arduino Mega 2560 every single pin can provide or receive a maximum of 40 mA. Arduino Mega has an internal pull-up resistor of 20-50 Kiloohm [8]. In 54 digital I/O pins, 15 pins are for pulse width modulation, 16 are analog input pins and 4 are hardware serial port [8]. The Arduino Mega 2560 has a lots of features like for communicating with a computer, another arduino or other microcontrollers. The arduino software includes a serial monitor which gives a permission to simple textual data to be sent to and from the board. For programming in Arduino Mega 2560, it uses Arduino IDE that supports C, C++, Java and Python languages. In Arduino IDE, we write code that is called sketch and that is transferred by USB cable [8].
Color Sensor
The color sensor is used to detect the color in the form of RGB frequency. TCS3200 color sensor has been used in the system. This sensor consists of four different photodiodes, where red filters consists of 16 photodiodes, blue filter consists of 16 photodiodes, green filter consists of 16 photodiodes and the rest 16 consists of clear with no filters [11]. Each filter has their own corresponding color. The TCS3200 measures the frequency of light. This sensor consists of 8 pins. In this sensor there are 4 LEDs fitted which is mainly used to clearly visualize the object color correctly [12].
TCS3200 Color Sensor