Remote Irrigation Monitoring System Of Mountain Orchard Based On LoRa

With the increasing of fruit planting area in south China in recent years,the problems of water consumption are becoming more and more obvious.Irrigating controlled artificially causes excessive irrigation and waste water resources easily.It will also cause the loss of fertilizer and pollution.But irrigation insufficiently will also affect the yield and quality of fruit orchard.Fine irrigation control based on soil and atmospheric environmental parameters is the main method to improve the yield and quality of fruit orchard.Cable communication,such as using rs-485 bus is mainly used in irrigation control,which is high reliability.However,the area of the mountainous orchard is usually large.It needs to deploy complex communication network to be applied in the mountainous orchard by using cable communication,which reduces the system reliability and improves the system cost.In order to communicate in the mountainous orchard and reduce the system cost,this paper studies the low power and medium distance wireless communication,Lo Ra technology.The study will combine the Lo Ra technology into the traditional irrigation control system and design a remote irrigation monitoring system based on Lo Ra in the mountainous orchard.The power supply of mountainous orchard facilities is short,so the system using solar power and rechargeable lithium batteries as back-up energy to maintain the energy supply.Terminal nodes and gateways are controlled by STM32F103,communicating with Lo Ra,which realizes the design of wireless sensor layer.The system adopts the pulse solenoid valve with shorter working time instead of the traditional solenoid valve that needs to continuously provide energy to maintain the starting state and closes the corresponding power supply when the functional modules are not used in order to reduce the energy consumption.Lo Ra technology is a long distance wireless communication technology,which is able to overcome the shortcomings of short distance wireless communication with complex network coverage in the mountainous orchard,achieving long distance water-saving irrigation control in the large mountainous orchard.In this study,a cloud control information platform is built to realize the remote precise and real-time monitoring and irrigating for mountainous orchard.The wireless sensor layer in this system communicates with cloud control information platform through GPRS technology.The cloud control information platform in this system will store the data of soil humidity and location of terminal nodes in the database.Users can query the data on cloud control information platform,real-time monitor the soil humidity of terminal nodes,inquire the history,and control irrigating remotely of terminal nodes.This study tests the power consumption,the communication range and the functions of the system to verify whether the system can run in the mountainous orchard.The power of the solar panel required by the system is calculated and analyzed with testing the power consumption and response time of the system.The communication distance of the system is tested in a citrus orchard in Beituo,Hezhou,Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region which results that the system can basically cover an area of 300 acres of mountainous orchard and communicates between up to 2600 meters in the air.This study also tests the system functions in the tea plantation experimental field of Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences which results that the system could monitor the soil humidity of terminal node.