Red Team 2016
The Red Team’s networked soil monitoring sensor, featuring temperature and brightness sensors on the top, and electrical conductivity, moisture, and pH probes protruding from the bottom.
Networked Soil Monitoring Sensors
Gardeners and farmers often waste resources in their efforts to attain the best crop yields due to a lack of soil condition data. The goal of this project is to improve water and fertilizer efficiency in gardening and agriculture by creating a system where necessary data is made available, understandable and intelligently acted upon. Our project was to design a sensor that can measure soil conditions and transmit the data wirelessly to an application that a user can view.
Data collected by our unit are the soil’s moisture content, pH, nutrient contents, temperature, and light incident on it. We used an Arduino Yun to process the data and transmit it wirelessly to a web server for the user to view. The results of the project showed that this is a promising application of the Internet of Things for commercial agricultural use. Future goals for the project would be to display data visualizations on the web page, calibrate the sensors for long-term sensing, integrate multiple sensor units into one network, use a 6LoWPAN transmitter to save energy, and replace our pH probe with a nanobiosensor.
Related Tech Notes
- The Benefits of New Internet Protocols for Soil Sensors (pdf) by Zachary Sogard
- Applying Nanotechnology and Biology to Detect pH (pdf) by Allegia Wiryawan
Red Team Project Poster
