An Advanced Irrigation System Using Cloud-Based IoT Platform ThingSpeak

The conventional irrigation systems are manual and thus require human effort and interruption to water the crops, and in such a scenario, water wastage is evident. This work was designed to address these two problems associated with conventional irrigation systems, i.e. manual operation and water wastage. The system designed has been made smart and thus has automatic decision-making ability to reduce human effort and interruption. The designed system has made use of sensors like soil moisture sensor, temperature and humidity sensor, and rain sensor and thus can calculate the moisture content of the soil, read surrounding temperature and humidity, and sense rainfall. It has the feature of making an application programming interface (API) weather call to extract information about rainfall from the OpenWeather webpage and finally makes a decision comparing all collected data and threshold data already set by the user. ThingSpeak, a cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) platform, has been used for storing the data read by various sensors in the form of graphs for better visualization and future reference. A (Global System for Mobile Communication-Global Positioning System) GSM-GPS module is also taken into work for establishing Internet connection and determining the system location for precise weather data. The system was tested for different threshold values of soil moisture and temperature reading, and based on the comparison with real-time sensor values, it successfully turned ON/OFF the motor and thus found to work fine as desired. The weather data fetched by the system also found to match with the real-world weather conditions.