Agriculture automation & Monitoring

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello,

Me and a friend trying to create a project which needs to monitor things like moisture, temperature in greenhouse and fiels for monitoring condition and also water the crops accordingly and if possible automate submersible pumps on cultivating ground over 4.2 Acres (182952 Sq Foot). Most of the sensors needs to be powered by battery and wireless monitoring.

I've done few small projects but this is quite big not sure will be able to do it with Arduino's & Raspberry pi. How do you power, control and manage this many senors? What's your views on this is this seems doable?

2

Well, the first question is: how big is your budget and how many years do you have to develop the system?

Paul

3

One suggestion.

RPi and ESP32's. The RPi can run MQTT Broker (server) to pass data back and forth or all around. The ESP32's can run PubSubClient. You can write Python script, or C++ code or use Node-Red on the RPi, as a communications handler. Heck, once the data is at the RPi you can, as I do, send it to your website or make changes to settings, on the web site, read the changes on the RPi and send them to the proper ESP32 for processing.

The ESP32's can be run off solar/battery.

4

Where in the world are you ?

Whats the budget ?

Do you have an Internet connection in the farm ?

5

Start with a couple of sensors, learn how to use them, and work your way up. Cheap soil moisture sensors are notoriously unreliable, as hundreds of posts on this forum testify.

Most of the sensors needs to be powered by battery

That makes the project doubly difficult. Wireless communication doubles it again. Take a look at this solar powered wireless sensor tutorial.

6

Idahowalker:
One suggestion.

RPi and ESP32's. The RPi can run MQTT Broker (server) to pass data back and forth or all around. The ESP32's can run PubSubClient. You can write Python script, or C++ code or use Node-Red on the RPi, as a communications handler. Heck, once the data is at the RPi you can, as I do, send it to your website or make changes to settings, on the web site, read the changes on the RPi and send them to the proper ESP32 for processing.

The ESP32's can be run off solar/battery.

That would be nice, but I wonder whether the distances would be too long for wifi, especially if the land parcel isn't a convenient shape.

7

the projecrt can be done in stages.
simple solar monitoring and rain monitoring
monitor water volume
and using your arduino as a clock.

if you water every 2 days, then 2 days after it rains.
you can set the water volume to deliver a specific amount of water.

also, with that much land, you probably have only a few crops. you can set our cucumbers and tomatos for extra water, your onions for only a little.

you should be able to get started with some simple parts and start to build and expand as you gain confidence and experiance.

also, the UNO/ESP can control a relay and a relay can control pumps or water valves.

the first step is to get a simple timer controlling a pump/valve
then adding rain, sun, soil, etc

8

It took me a few years in spare time but I did it with Arduino. I have a mobile app with a fully automated LoRaWAN garden.

Scroll down to LoRaWAN gardens. You’ve got a lot of hurdles ahead of you. Your best bet is to use as much as you can to stitch a solution together. I built all of mine from scratch, but there wasn’t as much available a few years ago.

WiFi and ESP32 will chew through battery depending on how often you’re sending/receiving data. LoRa works very well, but WiFi is certainly easier.