SYNOPSIS

Project Title: Soil Nutrient detection and suitable crop suggestion in automatic irrigation system.
Abstract: Development of agriculture using technology will be very much useful in cultivation.
For a new agricultural area, without knowing or monitoring the important parameters of the soil,
cultivation will be difficult and so the farmers suffer financial losses. This project provides a brief
overview of the soil monitoring system using sensors. Various soil sensors are used to measure
temperature, moisture and light, humidity and ph value. The information from the sensors in the soil
is sent to the MCP3204 A/D converter then from A/D converter it send to the cloud through
Raspbeery pi. Finally we can see the information saved to cloud on laptop. On the basis of
information we know which crop is suitable with given soil parameter. Thus this advanced
technology helps the farmers to know the accurate parameters of the soil thus making the soil
testing procedure easier.
Software-hardware requirements
H/W Requirements:

A/D Converter MCP3204

Specification:
Operating voltage 2.7V 5.5V

sampling rate 100 ksps at VDD=5v

sampling rate 50 ksps at VDD=2.7v

Resolution 12 bit
Microcontroller Raspberry pi
Specification:
CPU: Quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 clocked at 1.2 Ghz.

GPU: 400MHz VideoCore IV multimedia.

Memory: 1GB LPDDR2-900 SDRAM (i.e. 900MHz)

USB ports: 4.

Video outputs: HDMI, composite video (PAL and NTSC) via 3.5 mm jack.

Network: 10/100Mbps Ethernet and 802.11n Wireless LAN.

Temperature/Humidity sensor DHT11

 Moisture Sensor FC-28
ph value sensor
Level sensor
S/W System Configuration:-

Operating system Raspbian(Linux)

programming language python, HTML

Mysql database

Technical Keywords:
Soil Monitoring, Raspberry Pi, Sensors
Domain: IoT
Introduction:
Soil monitoring is an essential process which is needed for agriculture. 26% of the Earths surface is
exposed as land. Almost all humanity lives on the terrestrial, solid Earth comprised of bedrock and
the weathered bedrock called soil. Soil is a mixture of inorganic mineral particles and organic
matter of varying size and composition. The particles make up about 50 % of the soils volume.
Pores containing air and water occupy the remaining volume. The important parameters needed to
be measured in the soil are temperature, moisture, humidity and light. At olden days, the farmers
used to see the soil and will cultivate the required crop so the parameters are not accurately known
to them to test the soil. Then after the soil testing laboratories are used to test the features of soil in
which many tedious processes takes place to measure each parameter of the soil. After that many
real time projects for autonomous soil monitoring purpose were done using probe systems and
wired sensors. The data collected are transmitted through Zigbee, GSM, GPS and other
technologies.
The recent invention for soil monitoring is the four wheel rover which is a robot that has complex
implementation that needs to incorporate a suspension design and high cost. To overcome the
disadvantages of this rover, a smart wireless sensor based soil monitoring application SMART
AGRO is developed for the ease of measuring soil features. The system is used to measure the
important parameters of soil such as temperature, moisture and light using sensors which is suitable
for all types of soil. These soil sensors can be used at multilayers and multi points of the soil. The
data collected is transmitted to the thingspeak using WiFi technology. The MCP3204 A/D converter
is used to interface the sensors with the raspberry pi. By knowing the features of soil, the cultivation
of crops can be made easier and efficient.
Objectives:
The main objective of this project is given below:
1. To implement a system which is used to monitor the soil parameters of the soil
2. To suggest the crops to the soil according to the parameters of soil
3. To implement a system which suggests the allotment of fertilizers

Goals:
The aim of the implementation is to demonstrate that the cloud based IoT scheme for precision
agriculture can be used to monitor different parameter of soil required for plant growth using
sensors and send the sensed parameter to cloud so that it is possible to anyone to access this data
anywhere. On this monitored data framer know which crop is suitable with measured parameter.
Problem Statement:
Nowadays, an agricultural industry is one sector that is an important source of economic growth.
Agriculture is seen as the country's most successful field that profitable. An agricultural sector uses
the manpower to work, such as uses the manual system to monitor the soil condition but they not
efficiency and unreliable to collect data. In addition, by using the manual system, a lot problem can
occur, for example, it will reduce the productivity and quality of the product. No sensor to control
the moist and creates difficulty to humans to analyze the soil condition. It will take more costs to
investigate or monitor the problem and waste time or energy to get the result. At the same time, the
user will depend on the lab system to know the previous data. Furthermore, in agriculture, such as
seed palm oil need to observe the soil for growth. Imagine when the plant has corrupted, the
consumer or farmer will have less money and how much time that they need to recover. So to
reduce such draw back we need such system which is helpful for growth of agriculture field.
 User
Block Diagram:

IoT
DHT 11

Moisture
Sensor
Raspberry pi Relay
MCP 3204 board 3
Water Level

Water level
Ph Sensor

Fig- Soil Nutrient detection and suitable crop suggestion

The above fig shows the block diagram for soil nutrient detection and suitable crop suggestion.
In this project we design the system which is useful for the agriculture. The temperature
sensor, analog moisture sensor, humidity sensor and ph value should be kept in the soil of two
samples i.e one with chemical pesticides and another with compost which has to be tested. Each
sensor is separately connected to the MCP3204(ADC) transmit the information on about the
parameters to the raspberry pi. This raspberry pi Module sends the information to the cloud then the
user can see the soil parameter information on the laptop using web browser in the form of graph.
On the basis of this soil parameter we will get which crop is suitable with such soil parameter.
Atmospheric Digital Temperature & Humidity Sensor: DHT11 sensor is chosen to monitor
ambient temperature and humidity . This sensor proved to be reliable and stable. The output from
DHT11 is a calibrated digital signal which can be interfaced directly to Arduino Uno port pin. It
utilizes exclusive digital-signal-collecting-technique and humidity sensing technology that
calibrates automatically. With its small size, low power consumption, and ability to function in all
kinds of harsh application occasions, make the DHT11 suitable to use as a drought monitoring
sensor.
Soil Moisture Sensor:
Despite the importance of soil moisture information, widespread and/or continuous measurement of
soil moisture is all but non-existent. "The lack of a convincing approach of measurement of soil
moisture is a serious problem" . Clearly, a need exists for continuous measurements of surface soil
moisture. Also, remote soil moisture sensing increases the efficiencies of irrigation systems by
preventing over watering and leaching of fertilizers and other chemicals offsite. Soil Moisture
sensor FC-28 comes with a pair of tech probes that can be inserted in the soil. A small current flow
through the probes and the level of resistance will be measured. The resistance increases if the soil
is dryer. The output from the sensor is an analogue output that can be connected to one of the
analogue to digital port (ADC) available on the microcontroller board. FC-28 soil moisture sensor
module has been calibrated in order to verify accurate operation of the device. A pot with potting
soil was taken and the moisture levels are changed regularly. The pot was exposed to hot sun in
order to get rid of the moisture. This allowed us to simulate a dry, arid soil environment.
Advantages:
1. It is possible to see the fluctuating paramters of soil by graphical representation as well as we get
to know which crop suitable with such soil parameter.
2. The implementation is made easier thus this system is economic.

Conclusion:
This approach for measuring the soil parameters is used for the efficient plant growth. The results
obtained from the measurement have shown that the system performance is quite reliable and
accurate. The important parameters of the soil such as temperature, moisture, humidity and ph value
are checked by the respective sensors. The measured parameters are transmitted to the cloud
through the raspberry pi wifi. Finally we can see the graph of soil parameter and suitable crop for
this parameter on mobile phone as well as laptop through browser.
References:
[1] J.Dhivya, R.Siva Sundari, S.Sudha, R.Thenmozhi, Smart Sensor Based Soil Monitoring
System, International Journal of Advanced Research in Electrical, Electronics and Instrumentation
Engineering(An ISO 3297: 2007 Certified Organization)Vol. 5, Issue 4, April 2016
[2] Kay Smarsly,Agricultural ecosystem monitoring based on autonomous sensor systems,IEEE
Conference-2013
[3] Zhang xihai, Zhang changli, and Fang junlong, Smart Sensor Nodes for Wireless Soil
Temperature Monitoring Systems in Precision Agriculture, 2009, 237-241
[4] Bogena H.R, Huisman J.A, OberdErster C, et al. Evaluation of a low cost soil water content
sensor for wireless network applications,[J].Journal of Hydrology, 2007, 32-42.
[5] Prof C. H. Chavan, Mr.P. V.Karande, Wireless Monitoring of Soil Moisture, Temperature &
Humidity Using Zigbee in Agriculture,International Journal of Engineering Trends and
Technology (IJETT) Volume 11 Number 10 - May 2014.
[6] Kedari Sai Abhishek and S. Malarvizhi, Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor
Network on Precision Agriculture,I J C T A, 9(37) 2016, pp. 103-108, International Science Press.