Design and Development of Automatic and Remotely Controlled Plant Watering and Soil Moisture Sensing System

Agriculture is the backbone of any Countrys economy and there is a strong correlation between agricultural growth and economic prosperity. We need a new and effective technology which can improve continuously the productivity, profitability, sustainability of our major farming systems. The main objective of the present paper is to develop a smart wireless sensor network (WSN) for a water management system which is composed of a number of sensor nodes with mesh networking capability that can be deployed for continuous monitoring purpose. The parameters involved in the water management system such as soil moisture, temperature and humidity is measured in the real time by the sensors that send the data to the main controller board. A traditional approach to measure these factors in an agricultural environment meant individuals manually taking measurements and checking them at various times. This paper investigates an automatic irrigation system that switches a motor upon sensing the parameters using Wireless Zigbee Networks and status can be monitored and controlled through GSM based android application. The advantage of using this method is to reduce human intervention and still ensure proper irrigation. The developed platform is cost-effective and allows easy customization.