Figure 1. Block Diagram of Proposed Work i-
Water is a major source of energy for all the living things whether it is a plant or an animal. In this modern world, there are a number of villages, where farmers depend on the rains and borewells for the irrigation of land. Monitoring overhead is still an issue for the farmers having a water pump. It is required to turn ON/OFF manually when needed. To minimize the labor effort, wasting of water, and monitoring overhead, it is the necessity to design an automated irrigation system to resolve such problems. In this paper, the authors propose an automated plant and crop irrigation system using various components like the microcontroller, GSM module, and sensor. This automated irrigation system is proposed to schedule water delivery to the crops.
In these days, the farmers of many localities are still using manual water pump for irrigation and mostly depend on monsoon seasons. It is a major challenge for the authors to design a low cost fully automated system, which can reduce the problem of manual overhead of irrigation to the crops since water is the major source of energy for all the species (Awati and Patil, 2010; Uddin et al., 2012). Therefore, the conservation of water is very important for the next generation. An agriculture is an industry which is booming and requires lots of water (Feng, 2011; Rane et al., 2015). In future, the wastage of water will represent a large sum of money and the people who manage this resource efficiently will be winning both the time and money as well (Uddin et al., 2012). In this paper, an automated smart irrigation system is proposed to minimize the water input and the human intervention which will definitely satisfy the need of plants (Avatade and Dhanure, 2015). In this proposed work, GSM module plays a major role, where the GSM-based control system is used to control the system (Patil and Malviya, 2014). Using GSM networks and sensors, a control system is to be designed so that proper utilization of water can be done in the irrigation system (Hoffman and Martin, 1993; Nandurkar and Thool, 2012). In this paper, an embedded system is used irrespective of weather conditions, the main concept behind it is to continuously monitor the state of the field and send information to the controller, which is connected to the GSM module. Transreceiver section of the GSM module is placed in the field, i.e. a GSM modem on receiving the signal from the field, would turn ON/OFF the motor (Hussain et al., 2013; Masia et al., 2005; Nagothu, 2016) .
The main objective of this paper is to design a GSM based smart irrigation system so that the flow of water can be controlled.
Irrigation is a time-consuming process and it should be done in a reasonable amount of time, which also requires large human resource (Barradas et al., 2012). Traditionally, it was completely done by human beings. Nowadays, some technology has already been designed that will reduce the human resource and also the time required to water the plants. But the problem with these systems is that the control is for very limited time. Mass irrigation is also a method to water the plant, but the excess water evacuates through holes of the pots in greenhouses or it percolates via soil in the fields. Renewable resource is also used in abundance (Koech et al., 2011). But in various parts of the country, water consumption is taxable. The labor cost also becomes more expensive in addition to the excessive cost of water. A lot of work has already been done on the irrigation system. A WSN based weather forecast information system based on GSM to overcome the shortage of water in the field was developed earlier. But the major drawback of this method is the use of the licensed network for which the user needs to pay for using the network of WSN (Phene et al., 1973). The system is based on the environmental parameters, such as temperature, humidity, electric load and air quality. This system is controlled by a smartphone and for the intelligent irrigation system, Wi-Fi protocol and ZigBee modules were used. It was also not a cost-effective method for irrigation (Nagothu, 2016). An Irrigation Management System based on the wireless sensor network with remote monitoring mechanism was implemented based on GPRS but GPRS mechanism is costly to use (Plusquellec et al., 1994). A water-saving irrigation system based on solar energy that contains ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network, which collects information of soil, such as moisture, temperature, etc., and then transmits the data by the GPRS network (Avatade and Dhanure, 2015). In another paper, temperature and soil moisture sensor which are placed in the root section of plant and the gateway unit handles all the data or information about the sensor and carries the data to a web application (Wan, 2012). In this method, one algorithm was designed for measuring threshold values of the temperature sensor and soil moisture sensor to control water quantity (Surani, 2009; Gutiérrez et al., 2014). In this paper, acoustic-based technique is used to measure soil moisture content. This technique is developed to measure the level of soil moisture in real time (Barwarkar et al., 2014; Uddin et al., 2012). In this technique, the relation between speed of sound and the degree of saturation with water in soils is used (Adamo et al., 2004). In this paper, an automatic irrigation system is proposed in which various sensors are placed in the field. Sensors placed in the field continuously monitors moisture level and then sends the information to the farmer through a cellular phone (Jackson et al., 2010).
In this proposed work, the hardware required is Microcontroller (AT89S52), LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), Soil moisture sensor, GSM module, Analog to Digital Converter (ADC0809), Relay (Pump Driver), and Power Source.
The steps involved in the Proposed work are given below.
1. Assemble all the hardware components along with the GSM module.
2. The input section contains soil moisture sensor with LCD display 16*2 and pumps are used for the output.
3. Initially, Moisture is sensed by the hygrometer connected to the ADC converter.
4. The hygrometer content, i.e. analog data is sent to the ADC0809 to convert the analog data into digital data.
5. The converted digital data is sent to the microcontroller unit that will help in the calculation of average moisture content.
6. The averaged data content would display at the output, i.e. on LCD.
7. The same data contents in terms of percentage is transferred to the mobile through GSM module.
8. On the basis of the data received by the mobile, the message is sent to the device in terms of the character, i.e. either A or B, where A is to turn ON the motor and B is to turn OFF the motor.
9. If the moisture percentage reaches below 40%, the user will manually sent command “A” to the device, so that the motor turns ON. Once the moisture level is increased upto the 80%, the user gets a message of 80% moisture level and the user will sent command “B” to the device, which in turn OFF the motor.
10. Similarly, the operation repeats from step 4 to step 9.
The microcontroller is a component carrying almost all the information that a computer requires. The microcontroller is also known as MCU and referred as a single chip which can control a wide range of electrical and mechanical appliances (Ebera and francisca, 2013; Gutiérrez et al., 2014). It is also known as embedded controller since the controllers are embedded into other devices. It is dedicated to perform a specific task and the program of the microcontroller is stored in ROM and it cannot be altered. It has an input device, small LED or LCD to display the output. It accepts the input from the device to which it controls and sends the control signal to the other devices so that it can be controlled according to the requirements (Jackson et al., 2010).
The 555 timer is used instead of using a crystal oscillator, which provides a stable frequency of oscillations, so that the analog to Digital converter can work properly. The soil moisture sensor are connected with the ADC which continuously senses the moisture level of the soil and sends it to the ADC converter connected to the microcontroller. The microcontroller in turn controls the motor according to the values received by the soil moisture sensor. The microcontroller is connected with the GSM module which receives the same value received by the microcontroller. The GSM module will send the status of moisture level as a message to the mobile and on the basis of that message the user will send the command to either turn ON or OFF the motor. The block diagram of the work is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Block Diagram of Proposed Work i-
Figure 2 shows the actual hardware interfacing and Figure 3 shows the output according to the average value.
Figure 2. Prototype of Proposed Work
Figure 3. LCD Output when Pump is ON & OFF
It is a module used to connect any device to the cellular phones. It has a modem which is used to modulate and demodulate the signals via a wireless network, which allows the connectivity through the internet. The modem consists of the module along with SIM (Subscriber Identity Module). This circuit is used to interface various device used in this research work. Mainly GSM module interfaces with a microcontroller (AT89C51). AT command is used to establish a connection between them. Initially, the Microcontroller sends commands to the GSM modem to activate it and then the required actions are performed.
Before the introduction of this system, the farmers manually check the moisture level in the soil. Irrigation is a cultural practice and requires more hard work in planting crops. It is important for the farmer to know when and how much water is required for the plants. To avoid this hardwork of the farmer, an automatic moisture detection tool has been introduced so that on or before the time the farmer would know when and how much water is required for irrigation. The soil moisture sensor is the best tool for real-time monitoring of moisture level as moisture plays an important role in plant's life. The nutrients are required for the plant to grow them well. Similarly, water is also important for the plants to regulate temperature through the process of transpiration (Nandurkar and Thool, 2012). The soil moisture sensor has two probes, which acts as a variable resistor. When water is more in the field that means more conductivity and low resistance and vice versa. The soil moisture sensor device can be shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Soil Moisture Sensor (Nandurkar and Thool, 2012)
It is a thin and flat display device made up of several number of pixels (color or monochrome) arrayed in front of a light source or reflector, where between two transparent electrodes a liquid crystal molecule is suspended along with two polarizing filters, the axes of polarity are perpendicular to each other. In the absence of liquid crystals, light passing through one would be blocked by the other. 16×2 LCD is named so because it consists of 16 columns and 2 rows (Rane et al., 2015). There are number of combinations available for LCD, such as 8×1, 8×2, 10×2, 16×1, etc. But the most popularly used is 16x2 LCD is shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. 16x2 LCD (Rane et al., 2015)
LCD works in two different modes on the basis of bit one is 4 bits mode and other is 8 bits mode. In 4 bits mode, the data bit is transmitted in form of a nibble (group of 4 bits at a time) transmitted at a time. In 8 bits, 1 byte of data is transmitted, i.e. group 8 bits at a time.
In this paper, the authors proposed a method that can reduce human efforts as well as the wastage of water, since proper utilization of the water is very much necessary for irrigation. The microcontroller based smart irrigation system will help the farmers or the owners to control the flow of water into the field or in a garden.
First of all, we would like to thank our supervisor Mrs. Hemlata Sinha for her caring and guidance in completing this Irrigation System Project. Lastly, we would like to thank all the lecturers and friends who helped us in every way in completing this work.