Smart monitoring of soil parameters based on IoT

Monitoring of soil parameters is one of the major concerns in agricultural practices. Monitoring of these parameters leads to increase in yield as well as quality. Soil moisture and soil temperature are two basic soil parameters to characterize soil. Depending on these parameters, decisions can be taken up for optimum use of input resources. In this paper, development of basic soil parameters monitoring system and its testing is demonstrated. Here, YL-69 soil moisture sensor is used for soil moisture measurement. The determination of soil temperature is done using K-Type thermocouple. MAX6675, a cold junction compensated K-type thermocouple to digital converter chip is taken for its signal conditioning counterpart. The system is integrated with Arduino Uno and ESP8266 Wi-Fi module to make the system Internet of things (IoT) enabled. The data are transferred to ThingSpeak platform for visualization and processing. The developed system is calibrated and tested in the laboratory environment. Calibration is done with 0% soil moisture and 100% soil moisture. Testing of the developed system is done with different water content.