Development of a low-cost iot platform for data collection

Precision agriculture in the Internet of Things (IoT) integrates different technologies able to raise crop productivity, optimize resource efficiency, and accelerate decision making. However, the adoption of this technology is usually costly, affecting the acquisition by the farmers. Thus, the objective of this work was to develop and evaluate low-cost hardware to obtain data in a hydroponic system via IoT. The experiment was conducted at the Pici Campus of the Federal University of Ceará and split into three distinct stages. Firstly, the DS18B20 temperature sensors were calibrated in water, using the KR380 infrared thermometer as a comparison method. For the second step, when the hydroponic system was installed, the water temperature was monitored in the channel and not in the solution reservoir. In this same phase, the quality of data sending and receiving was investigated. In the third step, the sensory data were analyzed with those obtained by the local Meteorological Station. The calibration results revealed that the DS18B20 sensor has reasonable accuracy and excellent agreement and reliability between data. As for receiving and storing, only 6% of the total data was lost.