Remote Data Acquisition Of Smart Agriculture

Remote data acquisition is one of the most important methods for protectedagriculture, factory equipment monitoring, environmental monitoring and many otherfields. It combines micro-controller technology, embedded software and hardware design,sensor technology and data communication technology. Now it has become a very hottopic in the research of modern control technology. Choosing the optimalmicro-controller and the related electronic elements, designing software and hardwarewith embedded software engineering methods, and achieving a system with strongrobustness and high cost-efficiency have become the main research areas of remote dataacquisition.The architecture of remote data acquisition proposed in this paper consists of aMK60N512VMD100microprocessor which was released by Freescale in2011, a GPRSmodule MG323, an A/D acquisition module and a camera. We complete the hardwaredesign and develop the protocol and database, based on the existing work of ourlaboratory. We finish the software design running on the MCU based on the infrastructureof the microprocessor. At last, the complete system, including software and hardware, istested with the environment of smart agriculture.In the process of hardware design, we packaged the system into reusable hardwareentity by abiding component-based principles. In detail, the system is divided into fivecomponents: MCU kernel, power-supply module, GPRS module, camera module anddata acquisition interface. During the design of hardware, any adverse factor was takeninto consideration and necessary circuit protection has been added.The software design was completed in two parts, master and data center. Aiming atshortening the system development cycle and reducing the difficulty of upgrade andmaintenance, component-based masters take advantage of the existing softwarecomponent and do further work to meet different requirements of the application. On theother hand, modular-based data center software makes the best use of C#multi-thread as well as Socket communication and provides two modules: listing software andmanagement software. Listening software is responsible for communication betweenmasters and data center, while management software is for friendly interactive interface.The integration test indicates that this system satisfies the requirement on the remotedata acquisition during the use of smart agriculture with outstanding stability, whichcertainly provides a new alternative for realizing agriculture automation.