Open Access

ARTICLE

A Study on Using a Wireless Sensor Network to Design a Plant Monitoring System

by Sung-Jung Hsiao¹, Wen-Tsai Sung^2,*

1 Department of Information Technology, Takming University of Science and Technology, Taipei, 11451, Taiwan
2 Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, 41170, Taiwan

* Corresponding Author: Wen-Tsai Sung. Email:

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing 2021, 27(2), 359-377. https://doi.org/10.32604/iasc.2021.014905

Received 26 October 2020; Accepted 01 December 2020; Issue published 18 January 2021

Abstract

Traditional agriculture has to face different climatic factors, resulting in unstable crop yields, whereas a plant factory is indoors, thus avoiding different natural disasters and insect pests. It is also available for bulk production in all-weather all year-round, guaranteeing crop quality. This study uses a wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture for multi-monitoring of a plant environment, aiming to improve its growing environment quality. In terms of monitoring environment, the sensor modules at the end device nodes are combined with Arduino for capturing the sensor values, which are transmitted by wireless signal transmission. The data of wireless signals are further transmitted by multiple end devices XBee to the coordinator XBee. The coordinator is in charge of collecting data, which are transferred via a Com port to the monitoring-end computer; the system interface classifies the sensing data and displays the sensor values on the screen; at the same time, the sense data are transferred to the Access database and stored. The sensor values are uploaded to a Cloud hard disk database MySQL, and real-time environment data can be seen on webpage. In terms of control, whenever an abnormal warning occurs as the environment sensing value exceeds the preset plant growing condition, the system interface displays a warning and transfers a wireless control signal via WSN to the control module of the terminal node. The electric apparatus is actuated when the control instruction is received to improve the environmental quality, until the abnormal warning stops, and the operation stops. There is an additional time setting function, whereby the user can set the sprinkling and lighting-up time in the system interface, so that at the present time, the program sends an instruction to the controller to activate the designated action. According to multiple experimental analyses, the combination of Arduino and XBee is applicable to different scenarios, such as an environmental monitoring system and an interaction with scenario, even robot making. Different wireless sensor applications can be constructed, so that the users can make further WSN technology development and innovations based on the results of this study.

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Citations