Design of Soil Humidity Monitoring System Using the Internet of Things Concept and MQTT

Abstract

Agriculture has been a relevant field that attracted attention in recent years caused by the growing population, which has raised the problem of food sufficiency. Therefore, one of the solutions that this study offered is to improve production results through innovations by performing an automatic plantation’s watering process that can be monitored remotely. The purpose of this study is to help farmers to be able to control the condition of the soil moisture, together with the automatic watering process. The hardware used in this research is the NodeMCU Board with Wi-Fi ESP-32, Relay, and Moisture Sensors. This research applied the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), where each sensor module was assembled to be an object that has been programmed to carry out its tasks. A fuzzy-based module was developed to regulate the pump control, measure soil moisture, and control the water pump machine. Furthermore, each object was given its own identity to facilitate the communication process of every object. This process was connecting each object through the internet network by applying a lightweight communication protocol, the MQTT protocol. The data from sensors that represented the condition of each object were displayed on a graph in real-time. There were also tables of data that can be printed into a document file. This research was able to assist farmers in the process of watering their plants. Therefore, the harvesting process had increased, with only a little maintenance cost.