Research And Development Of An Intelligent Control And Monitoring System Based On ARDUINO For Greenhouse Environment

All plants do require certain conditions for their proper growth.Therefore,it is important to bring the environmental conditions in a greenhouse under control so as to make them as near as perfect as possible.To create an ideal greenhouse environment.the main climatic and environmental parameters such as temperature,humidity,light intensity,soil moisture etcetera needs to be controlled.The need to produce high-quality vegetables or flowers throughout the whole year led to the development of automated greenhouses.The automated control system provides the most proper conditions of plant growth and controls the values of temperature,light intensity,humidity and soil moisture which are continuously controlled and monitored so as to optimize them to attain maximum yield and plant growth.The increase in greenhouses sizes has forced fanmers to increase measuring points for tracking changes in the environment,thus enabling energy saving and more accurate adjustments.However,increases in measuring points mean an increase in installation and maintenance cost.Not to mention,once the measurement points have been built and installed,they can be tedious to relocate in the future.Therefore,the purpose of this Master's thesis is to present a novel project called "Research and development of an intelligent control and monitoring system based on Arduino for the greenhouse environment" which is capable of intelligently monitoring and controlling the greenhouse climate conditions in a preprogrammed manner.The proposed system consists of three units:Sensor unit,Control unit,and Central Station.The sensor unit is a data acquisition unit.It is responsible for collecting data on the essential environmental variables and transmitting the data to the control station via the Ethernet shield module.The control unit simply acts a router in that it controls the flow of data and instructions between the sensor unit and the central station in a pre-programmed manner.This unit also manages the local actuators and devices such as water pump,humidifiern lights etcetera.The central station is the main controller of the whole system.It issues instructions to the control unit,processes incoming data and allows easy access to the data by users of the system.This station also stores and enables visualization of the data in real-time and enables adjustment of the greenhouse environment.For better monitoring of the environment condition in the greenhouse,the sensor unit is equipped with several sensor modules such as humidity,temperature,soil moisture,light and CO2.The communication between the sensor unit and the control unit is achieved by the Arduino ATmega2560 microcontroller.Both the sensor unit and the control unit require a Central Processing Unit to perform various tasks such as data acquisition,data processing,and data transmission thus the microcontroller is utilized by this two units.Communication between the control unit and the central station is achieved via the Etherlet shield module.The Arduino microcontroller was programmed using C programming language which is a processing language.The code was written in the Arduino integrated development environment and used to control the sensor station and also perform other functions including sending data to the central control station.Once collected by the sensor unit,the humidity,temperature,carbon dioxide concentration,soil moisture and light intensity measurements are stored in the MySQL database which is accessible on the server side of the system's web application.The database is administered by the PHPMyAdmin open source tool with the use of a web browser.The central station of the system was designed using several programming languages.For the server side of the system,PHP was the main programming language used.On the client side,different technologies were used,and they included;JavaScript,HTML5,JQuery,and CSS3 were used to design the user interface.The web application runs on a local XAMPP server installed in the root directory of a computer operating system.The Arduino microcontroller was set up with the Ethernet shield as a web server.The web server is used to serve up web pages that can be accessed from a web browser running on any device connected to the same network as the Arduino.The Arduino web server pages pennit access to the Arduino hardware-this allows the hardware to be controlled(e.g.switching on and off the pump from the web page)and monitored(e.g.reading the state of the actuators and displaying it on a webpage).The Arduino was assigned a static IP address for the network to enable easier response of the web server.Different experiments were carried out to determine the functionality and reliability of the designed network using the Ethernet shield web server technology.The results indicate that Ethemet modules can be utilized as one solution for lowering the installation cost,increase flexibility and reliability of the greenhouse monitoring and control system.The web-based application was interfaced to the Arduino,utilizing the Ethernet shield which is connected to the microcontroller,and to the web server and,visualizing the data acquired from the various sensors and the state of the different actuators.Results of the control system were tested,where the effectiveness of the designed solution was checked.Particular procedures and design solutions are additionally outlined in tihis thesis to highlight the solution.The overall system architecture shows advantages in cost,size,power consumption,flexibility,and distributed intelligence.It is believed that the outcome of this research will provide the opportunity for further research and development of a low-cost intelligent control and monitoring system for the greenhouse environment for commercial use.