Monitoring of Crop Growth Parameters using

Arduino and ESP8266

2022 2nd International Conference on Emerging Frontiers in Electrical and Electronic Technologies (ICEFEET) | 978-1-6654-8875-4/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICEFEET51821.2022.9848009

1st N. Umapathi 2nd Chilukamukku Vyshnavi

Dept of Electronics and Communication Engg Dept of Electronics and Communication Engg
Jyothishmathi Institute of Technology and Science Jyothishmathi Institute of Technology and Science
Karimnagar(TS), India Karimnagar(TS), India
[email protected]

3rd Kashireddy Srilekha 4th Vadlakonda Sahithi

Dept of Electronics and Communication Engg Dept of Electronics and Communication Engg
Jyothishmathi Institute of Technology and Science Jyothishmathi Institute of Technology and Science
Karimnagar(TS), India Karimnagar(TS), India

Abstract—India is an Agriculture dependent country. With the moist range is low, it sends the information to the Arduino
significant percentage of its population depending on farming as and trigger the relay to automatically switch ON Motor-1 and
their livelihood. Hence the monitoring of crop growth parameters when the soil moisture reaches to the point, the Motor-1 is
is important for efficient yielding. This Project is regarding Smart
Irrigation System by using Sensors. This smart irrigation system then automatically OFF. This process is the same in the case
provides Automatic and remote monitoring of the fields. In this of the Rain Sensor. When Motor-1 is ON, the water starts
system we are using sensors like pH, Temperature, soil moisture, flowing in the field, if it starts raining at the same time, the
rain, Low-power image Sensors. The soil moisture sensor is used rain is detected by using rain sensor and the corresponding
to monitor the moisture of the Soil. The temperature sensor will information is conveyed to the Arduino board to switch OFF
monitor the temperature level. The pH Sensor will check the pH
range of the soil. Rain sensor is used to detect the rain. If the the Motor-1 and it stops the flowing of water so that we can
values which are measured hit the threshold value, a message save water and Electricity. In the case of Low-Power Image
is forwarded to the user’s mobile number. Subsequently a relay Sensor, it detects the Insect-pest present in the field and makes
can be activated to switch on the sprinkler water motor to wet the Motor-2to ON and to spray the pesticides.
the crops. An Arduino Uno is used as the brains of the system
to interface with the sensors and IoT facility is provided using a II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Node MCU and Thingspeak. So, we are enhancing our project
with an additional feature by measuring pH of our crop and soil Abhiram MSD, Jyothsnavi Kuppili, et.al. [2] has proposed
with the help of pH sensor. By observing this pH values, we can a Smart Farming system that aims to increase the amount and
monitor and control our land from crop failures. The conclusion nature of agricultural items. In this, the device gives infor-
of our project is to reduce the workload of farmer by saving mation about the idea of cultivating fields and make a move
his time, money, water usage and providing him a healthy and
better proportion of crop yield. depending upon farm workers input. From anywhere in the
Index Terms—Smart Agriculture, IoT, NodeMCU, thingspeak world, a farmer can know about the environmental condition
of the field through the blynk app where he receives an SMS to
his Smartphone. Ayyaswamy, Eswaran,et.al.[1] has proposed
I. I NTRODUCTION Agri soil- Maintenance for protecting the crops from excess
This project will help the Farmers to monitor their fields water and improving micro-nutrients in the soil. For avoiding
easily. They can monitor their field from wherever they want lack of water in the yield. So, this project overcomes that
by using their smart phones which is containing the infor- problem. Rahul Dager et.al.[11] has proposed smart husbandry
mation that is sent by the Sensors. This project also helps using IoT. It uses sensors that accumulate data and directs
to save water and Electricity and to avoid Scarcity of Water the information to the server through a WIFI network. So,
which is the main problem faced by the Farmers in the field that the farming can be made more resourceful and accurate.
of Agriculture. The Temperature Sensor senses the value of Samudra Vishal Mukherji, Ritesh Sinha, et.al. [3] has focused
temperature present in the field and sends the information to on monitoring the real time agriculture environment using a
smart phones and pc through Wi-Fi module and also displays remote monitoring station. This IOT based system is a wireless
on LCD display. The pH Sensor senses the pH value of the networking concept and MQTT protocol helps to maintain an
farmland and sends information to the smartphone. The soil ideal crop growing environment. The author has not included
moisture sensor will detect the moist range of the soil, if the parameters like pH sensors and soil acidity sensor so that
the field environment cannot be monitored and controlled in
Identify applicable funding agency here. If none, delete this. an effective way. [14],[5] has focused on monitoring crops

Authorized licensed use limited to: Welcome Shri Guru Gobind Singhji Inst of Eng & Tech Nanded. Downloaded on September 17,2023 at 20:00:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 and meteorological parameters essential for an effective crop We can use Arduino uno to control lighting, cameras and even
growth. This IOT based system using Libelium aims to manage built some simple robots. Arduino board contains 14 digital
the irrigation issues at the agriculture fields and analyses the input and output pins (1 to13), six of which can produce PWM
crop growth rate. Prahlad Bhadani, Vasudhavashisht [6] has signals, and six analog input pins (A0 to A5) these are used
focused to foster an instrument for ranchers and cultivators to measure a continuous voltage from 0v to 5v. Arduino also
to check the reasonableness of ecological conditions to work comprises of power pins that we can connect wires with 5v or
with the development of yields and show the qualities in the with 3.3v according to the requirement of operation. Arduino
LCD display. Meili Liu, Caizhong Zhang [9] has focused also employs TX, RX pins i.e., for sending and receiving the
on developing a system that can able to briefly monitor the serial data.
parameters for an effective crop growth. It uses temperature,
humidity, light intensity and CO2 sensor to monitor the field’s
agricultural parameters. It aims to provide better financial
benefit to the farmer by reducing the cost of many equip-
ment. Aritro Roy Arko, Saadat Haasan Khan et.al. [8] has
focused on paddy rice field’s environment and pH of the soil
and temperature control using IOT based system and Node
MCU. The proposed system helps the farmers to control pH
and temperature of the soil using the IFTTT application for
maintaining the temperature and pH of the soil based on the
cloud data. [12], [15] has proposed a System using pH sensor, Fig. 1. Arduino UNO Board.
Temperature sensor, Soil moist sensor and ESP8266 sensor.
This system provides regular updates about the soil moisture
to the user by using Thingspeak IOT platform. Khampheth B. ESP8266 and Sensors
bounnady[4] has proposed a system to concentrate on the
impacts of development rate, delivering rate, water saving rate ESP8266 is used as the Wireless-Fidelity module to con-
of the farm. In this research, the system monitors temperature, vey the values from sensors to the Thing speak. When we
soil moisture and accordingly the plants are watered, this total connected it to a local Wi-Fi network the module gets internet
process is done with the help of some sensors, node MCU and access and provides IoT. DHT11 sensor measures the humidity
cloud computing. All collected data is effectively useful for the temperature and sends these values to the Arduino and then
farmer to monitor and can adjust some values in the system Thing speak. Soil moisture and rainfall sensor works as an
through an application. B. Sridhar, R. Nageswara Rao [13] has Analog sensor which changes its resistance based on the
proposed a smart irrigation system using Temperature and Soil wetness of the soil. pH sensor tests the acidity levels in the
moisture sensor, Raspberry pi zero, LM358 IC. This system soil moist. pH sensor is used here will measure the fertility
will help farmers that provide water to crop at stringent time of soil and thereby precautionary measures are taken. MQ-4
and quantity. So, this automatic irrigation system observes the sensor is a methane gas sensor.
moisture sensors and temperature variations around the crop
area and gives a precise time to operate the motor ON and
OFF. So, it automatically avoids human error and checks soil
moisture level. Rama prasad SS, Sunil Kumar BS, et.al. [7]
has developed a smart crop shielding device that ensures a
better crop growth by monitoring continuously. An Arduino
microcontroller and some sensors works to screen the moisture
levels of the soil, in view on which the pump will turn ON or
OFF, this promotes the ideal utilization of water in a specific
Fig. 2. DHT11 Sensor.
way. Thus, this monitoring device will ensure great and quality
yield by saving the water which is streaming in overabundance
and also secures the farming field from intruders
C. Relay and Motors
III. DESIGN AND IMPLIMENTATION
A relay is a device which controls AC appliances based
A. Arduino Mega Board on the DC signal. The DC signal can be either high or low
Arduino microcontroller are pre-programmed IC. These are and it is sent by Arduino microcontroller based on the input
basically works as a mini computer. Arduino Boards are by the user and soil moisture level. Motor-1 attached to one
loaded with a program code via a serial connection to another network of Relay and it is activated by the output values of
computer and we have more fancy Arduino boards which have soil moisture and rainfall sensor. Motor-2 is switched ON or
more powerful sensors and have WIFI, Ethernet and more. OFF by the user himself to spray the fertilizers and pesticides
Arduino is very cheap and good enough for most DIY projects. after the visual examination by the farmer.

Authorized licensed use limited to: Welcome Shri Guru Gobind Singhji Inst of Eng & Tech Nanded. Downloaded on September 17,2023 at 20:00:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 D. Software used Arduino IDE level then motor-1 is Switched OFF. Motor-2 is switched
The Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is ON or OFF by the farmers through mobile or PC with the
a piece of software that we are downloading and installing it Thing Speak website, after the close examination of the field’s
into our computers to write the code for our Arduino boards. fertility and pest damages. Fig. 4 shows the real-time circuit
That we can able to upload that code into our Arduino board.
It is very easy to use and it supports all the Arduino boards
and it has a built-in library manager that is also very easy
to use. Arduino IDE is a cross-platform application for many
users to write and upload programs to Arduino board. It can
run on windows like MAC OSX and LINUX for writing the
programs.
E. Thingspeak
Thing speak is an open data platform developed for Internet
of things Applications, simply it is just an intermediate tool for
aggregating, analyzing and to envisage the live data streams in
the cloud. Using this platform, one can easily access the data
with and without internet source, this is believable because it
stores the information in one central location in cloud. It also
protects the user’s private data by using a unique API key that
is assigned to every individual and it securely stores the data
in the cloud.
Fig. 4. Hardware Design Implementation in Proteus 8 professional.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
This system works with the help of sensors. These sensors of the proposed system. All the sensors are connected to the
are located in the soil of fields apart from each other forming a GPIO pins of the Arduino and ESP8266 as shown in circuit.
network covering the whole field area. They are all connected The coding is done accordingly keeping in mind the threshold
values of soil moisture and pH values.

Fig. 5. Implemented Hardware Setup.

V. RESULTS
Fig. 3. Block Diagram of the proposed system. This circuit is tested by placing the DHT11, moist sensors,
rainfall sensor and PH levels in a field and the following results
to the Arduino UNO as illustrated in Fig 3. The moisture are obtained. The coding in this worked correctly by giving
content and PH level in soil, weather conditions at the field, accurate values of temperature, soil moisture content, pH and
humidity and temperature values are continuously under mea- rainfall values in analog form to the thing speak website. The
surement, and when they fall below a set threshold the Arduino values are plotted vs time/date as graphs in the thing speak
sends the notification to Thing speak. The data is stored and website for future references and evaluation of performance of
plotted in the thingspeak website for future reference. If the the system. The above fig. is showing the resultant humidity
moisture content is low in soil or no rainfall then motor-1 and soil moisture levels at certain particular date and time.
is switched ON to wet the field. After a few minutes by Where the humidity levels are being varied in a short period
the pumping of water the moisture content reaches enough of time and soil moisture level is varied at particular time

Authorized licensed use limited to: Welcome Shri Guru Gobind Singhji Inst of Eng & Tech Nanded. Downloaded on September 17,2023 at 20:00:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 TABLE I
VALUES OBTAINED DURING THE PRACTICAL ANALYSIS FOR 4 DIFFERENT
LOCALLY CULTIVATED CROPS

Crop Production Time Water Stat.Ph Tested

* Taken (In Days) Required (In ml) Scale (Theoretical) Ph Value
Rice 90-150 900-2500 6.0 – 6.7 5.4-6.1 a

Tomato 135-180 600-800 6.0-6.8 6.0-6.9 a

Cotton 180-195 700-1300 6.0 -7.0 6.4-7.7 a

Maize 60-100 500-800 5.8 -7.0 5.0-6.5 a

aa

Fig. 6. Graph showing Output analog values vs time/Date for Soil moisture TABLE II
sensor and humidity in ThingView app. I DEAL P H RANGES AND VALUES FOR DIFFERENT SOURCES OF WATER FOR
PRODUCING BEST CROP YIELD .

Source Of Water Ph Value

instant. The above graphs depicting pH values and temperature Tap Water 7 .5 a

Pure Water 7a

Rain Water 5.0-5.5a

Bore Water 7.1 a

Well Water 8.0a

aa

A. Problems faced during hardware construction:

While constructing the hardware setup, as there are more
Fig. 7. Graph showing Output vs time/Date for pH sensor and temperature than three sensor modules, a relay and motor which consumes
in ThingView app
more power that cannot be provided by Arduino itself, also
the switching of relay leads to erasing of Arduino program
levels which are measured for different types of solutions and
memory.This is because, the relay is directly connected to
for different surrounding conditions. The above graph gives
the Arduino. To eliminate this problem, an intermediary
component is employed for meeting power requirements as
well as to protect Arduino memory which is erased due to
switching of relay when it is directly connected to Arduino.
The intermediate component utilized here is a set of IR sensor
modules in which one IR sensor acts as transmitter and other as
receiver. The transmitter transmits the soil moisture sensor data
from Arduino to relay through receiver. This transmission of
data from transmitter to receiver is wireless and very efficient
Fig. 8. Graph showing Output vs time/Date Rain sensor in Thing View app. way of passing the data to relay without losing our Arduino
memory. And no power fluctuations are aroused during this
information about rainfall, at the time of raining the rain drops transmission. So, this the best way of resolving the problem
are sensed by the rain sensor module and displays as ‘Rain’ arise during beginning of our hardware setup.
when there is rain and displays ‘No Rain’ when it is not
raining. VI. CONCLUSION
The above tabular values are observed during the month of This system is very easy to use and efficient in terms of
January, an overall average sensor values are tabulated by keen cost. It detects the temperature, humidity, rainfall, pH and
observation. soil moisture. The output is displayed on thingspeak website
The above tabular values give ph values of different sources as graphical representations. The system can be used as a
of water which are usually drawn by the farmer from well or substitute for farm workers up to an extent. Watering the
by preserving the rain water or ground water. field and spraying the pesticides is done without any physical

Authorized licensed use limited to: Welcome Shri Guru Gobind Singhji Inst of Eng & Tech Nanded. Downloaded on September 17,2023 at 20:00:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 assistance using this system. The ph sensor in this system
assists with keeping up with the ideal PH level which saves
the yield from crop failure. Rainfall and storm conditions at the
field are estimated using this system. future weather conditions
are assessed using this system it helps the farm workers to save
water and other fundamental requirements of the agriculture
and this system assist the farmer by saving the time which
they can use it for some other work.
R EFERENCES
[1] Dr. Ayyasamy S, Eswaran S, Manikandan B, Mithun Solomon S P,
Nirmal Kumar S, “IoTbased Agri Soil Maintenance Through Micro-
Nutrients and Protection of Crops from Excess Water” Proceeding of
the Fourth InternationalConference on Computing Methodologies and
Communication (ICCMC), ISBN:978-1-7281- 4889-2, 2020.
[2] Abhiram MSD, Jyothsnavi Kuppili, N. Alivelu Manga, “Smart Farm-
ing System using IoT for Efficient crop Growth”. IEEE International
Students’ Conference on Electrical, Electronicsand Computer Science,
2020.
[3] Samudra Vishal Mukherji, Ritesh Sinha, Soumya Basak, Sambit Prasad
Kar “Smart Agriculture using Internet of Thing and MQTT”. 2019
International Conference on Machine Learning, Big Data, Cloud and
Parallel Computing (Com- IT-Con), India, 978-1-7281-0211- 5/19, 2019.
[4] Khampheth Bounnady, Khampasith Chanthavong, Savath Saypadith,
“Smart Crop Cultivation Monitoring System by Using IoT”. IEEE 978-
1-7281-0067-8/19, 2019.
[5] N. Umapathi and Sai Teja Sabbani, Roshini, SaiKiran., (2020), Design
and Implementation of Prevent Gas Poisoning from Sewage Workers us-
ing Arduino., 2020. (IEEE-iSSSC 2020), at GIET University, Gunupur,
India from Dec 16- 17, 2020.
[6] PrahladBhadani, Dr. Vasudha Vashisht, “Soil Moisture, Temperature and
Humidity Measurement Using Arduino”, 9th International Conference
on Cloud Computing, Data Science Engineering (Confluence), 2019.
[7] Ramaprasad S S, Sunil Kumar B S, SivaprasadLebaka, Rajendra Prasad
P, Sunil Kumar K N, Manohar G N, “Intelligent Crop Monitoring and
Protection System in Agricultural fields Using IoT”. 4th International
Conference on Recent Trends on Electronics, Information, Communica-
tion Technology (RTEICT- 2019), MAY 17th 18th 2019.
[8] Aritro Roy Arko, Saadat Hasan Khan, Mehrab Hossain Biswas, Asif
Imran, Abdulla HilKafi, Railhana Shams Islam Antara, “IoT based smart
water and environment management system of paddy rice at different
growth stages”. IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things
and Intelligence System (IoTaIS), 2019.
[9] Meili Liu, Caizhong Zhang, “Design of Hierarchical Monitoring System
for Crop Growth Environment Based on Arduino Yun Development
Platform”. 2019 2nd International Conference on Safety Produce In-
formation (IICSPI).
[10] Hamza BENYEZZA, Mounir BOUHEDDAN, Khaoula DJELLOUT.
“Smart Irrigation System Based Thingspeak and Arduino”. International
Conference on Applied Smart System (ICASS), 2018.
[11] Rahul Dagar, Subhranil Som, Sunil Kumar Khatri. “Smart Farming-
IoT in Agriculture”. Proceedings of the International Conference on
Inventive Research in Computing Applications(ICIRCA), 2018.
[12] Sujit Thakare, P.H Bhagat, “Arduino-Based Smart Irrigation Using
Sensors and ESP8266 WIFI Module”. Proceedings of the Second
International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems
(ICICCS), 2018.
[13] B.Sridhar , R.Nageswara Rao “IOT Based Smart Crop- Field Monitoring
And Automation Irrigation System” Proceedings of the Second Interna-
tional Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC 2018).
[14] Ioana M. Marcu, George Suciu, “IoT based System for Smart Agricul-
ture”, ECAI 2019 - International Conference-11th Edition.978-1- 7281-
1624-2/19, 2019.
[15] Umapathi N., Sabbani S. (2022) AnInternet of Things (IoT)-based
Approach for Real-Time Kitchen Monitoring Using NodeMCU 1.0.
Futuristic Communication and Network Technologies. Lecture Notes in
Electrical Engineering, vol 792. Springer, Singapore.

Authorized licensed use limited to: Welcome Shri Guru Gobind Singhji Inst of Eng & Tech Nanded. Downloaded on September 17,2023 at 20:00:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.