Smart System for Bicarbonate Control in Irrigation for Hydroponic Precision Farming

Abstract

Improving the sustainability in agriculture is nowadays an important challenge. The automation of irrigation processes via low-cost sensors can to spread technological advances in a sector very influenced by economical costs. This article presents an auto-calibrated pH sensor able to detect and adjust the imbalances in the pH levels of the nutrient solution used in hydroponic agriculture. The sensor is composed by a pH probe and a set of micropumps that sequentially pour the different liquid solutions to maintain the sensor calibration and the water samples from the channels that contain the nutrient solution. To implement our architecture, we use an auto-calibrated pH sensor connected to a wireless node. Several nodes compose our wireless sensor networks (WSN) to control our greenhouse. The sensors periodically measure the pH level of each hydroponic support and send the information to a data base (DB) which stores and analyzes the data to warn farmers about the measures. The data can then be accessed through a user-friendly, web-based interface that can be accessed through the Internet by using desktop or mobile devices. This paper also shows the design and test bench for both the auto-calibrated pH sensor and the wireless network to check their correct operation.

IoT-Based Smart Irrigation Systems: An Overview on the Recent Trends on Sensors and IoT Systems for Irrigation in Precision Agriculture

“…Among this outdoor agriculture cases [14,29,31,32,38,40,42,[46][47][48]52,[59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67], some papers specify the agriculture products in more detail: general cereal [14], rice [48,59], spinach, beans, carrots, walnuts, corn, barley and maize [47], and multi-height fields [60]. In addition, among the 14 papers about greenhouses [28,33,39,41,45,51,[68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75], five of them specify the type of crop. There are three cases of hydroponic crops [33,68,69], one case of mushroom cultivation [41] and one paper on flower farming [71].…”

“…Regarding the sensors of soil, plants, and water (see Figure 7), the most used sensor in the systems is the soil moisture sensor, it is used in 76 papers (more details in Section 4). First, we will analyze the data from soil and plant water [31,42,49,54,68,70,74,75,81,82], only four of them indicate this (three for soil [66,67,72] and one for water [69]). Only four papers consider plant monitoring, in two papers the measured parameter is the plant height [64,83], using an ultrasound sensor.…”

Sensor Network Proposal for Greenhouse Automation placed at the South of Algeria

“…In terms of perspective, in our future work, we hope to validate our algorithms with real data, to check if our algorithms control the greenhouse's internal climate. We also plan to add other parameters such as air quality as in [21] and consider other types of farming such as hydroponic farming as in [22]. Finally, for the system to be controlled remotely our future investigations will be on the development of the LoRaPAN communication.…”

Systematic review of Internet of Things in smart farming

“…Cambra et al 45 utilized IoT techniques to maintain pH level (bicarbonates, salts, and nitric acid) in nutrient solutions of hydroponic agriculture system. pH sensor and pH electrode measure the pH level and hydrogen concentration in nutrient solution and forward the collected data to the gateway NRF24L01.…”