IEEE SPONSORED 2ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

(ICECS 2015)

A Low Cost Smart Irrigation Control System

Chandan kumar sahu Pramitee Behera
Dept. of Electronics and communication engineering. Dept. of Electronics and communication engineering.
Sambalpur University Institute of Information Technology Sambalpur University Institute of Information Technology
Sambalpur(768019), INDIA Sambalpur(768019), INDIA
chandan.sahu@suiit.ac.in pramitee.behera@suiit.ac.in

Abstract—This paper focus on a smart irrigation system which farm field watering direction through a message whether the
is cost effective and a middle class farmer use it in farm field. farmer is far away from field know the status of water motor is
Today we are living in 21st century where automation is playing ON or OFF and direction of watering.
important role in human life. Automation allows us to control
appliances automatic control. It not only provide comfort but also
reduce energy, efficiency and time saving. Today industries are use In this paper we present a prototype for fully automation
automation and control machine which is high in cost and not accessing of irrigation motor where Prototype includes number
suitable for using in a farm field. So here we also design a smart of sensor node placed in different directions of farm field. Each
irrigation technology in low cost which is usable by Indian Sensors are integrated with a wireless networking device and
the data received by the “ATMEGA-328” microcontroller
farmers. The objectives of this paper were to control the
which is on a “ARDUINO-UNO” development board. The
water motor automatically and select the direction of the
RASPBERRY-Pi is use for send messages through internet
flow of water in pipe with the help of soil moisture sensor. correspondence to the microcontroller process. For
Finally send the information(operation of the motor and experimentation we have abstracted number of soil moisture
direction of water) of the farm field to the mobile message sensor used in different direction of the farm fields. The soil
and g-mail account of the user. moisture in each direction of field is sensed by sensor node and
the sensed data is sent to microcontroller node through wireless
Keywords—Soil moisture sensor, Electro magnetic valve, networking device. On receiving sensor value the controller
Arduino, Raspberry-Pi, Modem, Display,Wireless Sensor Network
node checks it with required soil moisture value. When soil
(WSN)
moisture in a particular field is not up to required level then
I. INTRODUCTION controller node switch on the motor to irrigate associated field
and the RASPBERRY-Pi process all data and notification SMS
In our country Agriculture is major source of food production is send to registered mobile phone which is registered in
to the growing demand of human population. In agriculture, RASPBERRY-Pi. The RASPBERRY-Pi is monitoring with a
irrigation is an essential process that influences crop screen to see the current status of the irrigation and use for
production. Generally farmers visit their agriculture fields change the setting of user required.
periodically to check soil moisture level and based on
requirement water is pumped by motors to irrigate respective
fields. Farmer need to wait for certain period before switching II. IMPORTANCE OF IRRIGATION
off motor so that water is allowed to flow in sufficient quantity
in respective fields. This irrigation method takes lot of time The rainfall of in our country depends on monsoons. Rainfall
and effort particularly when a farmer need to irrigate multiple controls agriculture, but the agriculture is said to be “the
agriculture fields distributed in different geographical areas. gambling of the monsoon” as the monsoon rainfall are
Traditionally farmers will present in their fields to do uncertain, irregular and uneven or unequal. So irrigation is
irrigation process. But nowadays farmers need to manage their essential for agriculture.
agricultural activity along with other occupations. Automation In INDIA there are 80% of the total annual rainfall occurs in
in irrigation system makes farmer work much easier. Sensor four months, i.e. from mid June to mid October. So it is very
based automated irrigation system provides promising solution necessary to irrigation for farm field during the rest of the
to farmers where presence of farmer in field is not eight months [1].
compulsory. A small processor programmed for control a
electromagnetic valve and also compare to electromagnetic III. METHODS OF IRRIGATION
valve operate motor to start watering. Really INDIAN farmers
need cheap and simple user interface for controlling sensor There are different types of method for irrigating farm field for
based automated irrigation system. Now a day's internet is different types crop field. Basically Indian farmer use these
widely used. Using internet farmer know about the agriculture three methods channel system, sprinkler system, drip system.
field irrigation status. This helps farmers to know the status of Channel system is a traditional method of irrigation. But a

978-1-4788-7225-8/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 1146

smart irrigation system is a new technology to irrigating farm worker need for irrigating. When the farmer knows the status
field automatically. of the farm field then start the motor and chose the direction
from nozzles. Then automatically watering the plants and after
A. Channel System
some time the farmer check the status of the field and while
This system is widely used in farming irrigation system. As the whole crop are irrigating then OFF the motor [1].
this system is a very low cost system for irrigating a large area
farming field. In this system pipes are connected with a water
pump and while pump started water flow through pipe a from
lake, river, bore well to farming field. And the farmer fully
engaged for irrigating the crop field with number of workers.
Huge amount of water waste and large number of workers are
engaged during watering.

Figure 3
DRIP SYSTEM IRRIGATION

D. Smart Irrigation System

Above three systems are generally operate by a user but a
smart irrigation tells that the total system is controlled by
autonomous mean automatically control the total irrigation
Figure 1 system whether the farmer is not present his farm field and
CHANNEL SYSTEM IRRIGATION send messages to the farmer about the information of farm
field and change in operation of the farm field. Which require
B. Sprinkler System no worker for operating, and also less waste of water with
compared to previous three methods.
This system is more useful whether the water is available in
smaller quantity. When pump started then water flow through
main pipe and also flow through the perpendicular pipes. A
nozzle on the top of perpendicular pipe is joined and rotating
automatically at regular intervals. This system is very useful
on the sandy soil. Less number of worker required water waste
is less [1].

Figure 4
SMART IRRIGATION SYSTEM

IV. SYSTEM COMPONENTS

A. Soil moisture Sensor
Soil moisture sensor includes comparator (LM393) which
converts analog data to discrete. Two soil probes consist of
Figure 2 two thin copper wires each of 5 cm length which can be
SPRINKLER SYSTEM IRRIGATION immersed into the soil under test. The circuit gives a voltage
output corresponding to the conductivity of soil. The soil
C. Drip System between the probes acts as a variable resistance whose value
In this system waterfall drop by drop at the position of the depends upon moisture content in soil. The resistance across
roots. It is the best technology for watering fruit plants, soil probes can vary from infinity (for completely dry soil) to a
gardens and trees. Water flow through a main pipe and divided very little resistance (for 100% moisture in soil) his variation
into sub pipes. Special prepared nozzles are attached to these in resistance across the probes (R S ) leads to variation in
sub pipes . In this system waste of water is very less and No forward-bias voltage which leads to corresponding variation

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in input base current (I b ). For common emitter configurations output make it ideal for multimedia applications such as media
I c ȕ, b ZKHUHȕLVFXUUHQWDPSOLILFDWLRQIDFWRU+HQce a small centres and narrowcasting solutions. The Raspberry Pi is
variation in base current leads to a large variation in emitter based on a Broadcom BCM2835 chip. It does not feature a
current and hence the emitter voltage is taken as the voltage built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD
output of sensor [4]. card for booting and long-term storage [9].
Specifications:
B. Arduino
Chip Broadcom BCM2835 SoC
The Arduino-Uno is a microcontroller board based on Core architecture ARM11
the ATmega328. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 CPU 700 MHz Low Power ARM1176JZFS Applications
can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a Processor
16 MHz ceramic resonator, a USB connection, a power jack, GPU Dual Core Video Core IV® Multimedia Co-Processor
an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything Provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG,
needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC Capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture
adapter or battery to get started [8]. filtering and DMA infrastructure
Memory 512MB SDRAM
Operating System Boots from SD card, running a version of
SUMMARY OF ARDUINO-UNO BOARD the Debian Linux operating system
Dimensions 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm
ATMEGA328 MICROCONTROLLER Power Micro USB socket 5V, 1.2A
Connectors:
OPERATING Ethernet 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
5V
VOLTAGE Video Output HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4)
Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC)
INPUT VOLTAGE Audio Output 3.5mm jack, HDMI
7-12V
(RECOMMENDED) USB 2.0 Dual USB Connector
GPIO Connector 26-pin 2.54 mm (100 mil) expansion header:
INPUT VOLTAGE 2x13 strip. Providing 8 GPIO pins plus access to I²C, SPI and
6-20V
(LIMITS) UART as Well as +3.3 V, +5 V and GND Supply lines.
Camera Connector 15-pin MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI-
14 (OF WHICH 6 2)
DIGITAL I/O PINS
PROVIDE PWM OUTPUT) JTAG Not populated
Display Connector Display Serial Interface (DSI) 15 way flat
ANALOG INPUT flex cable connector with two data lanes and a clock lane
6
PINS Memory Card Slot SDIO

DC CURRENT PER
40 MA D. Electro magnetic valve
I/O PIN
The solenoid is an electromagnetic part of a valve, comprised
DC CURRENT FOR of a coil, core tube, core and enclosure. The selection of 2-
50 MA way, 3-way and 4-waysolenoid valves, designed to handle the
3.3V PIN
most demanding fluid control applications.
32 KB (ATMEGA328)
OF WHICH 0.5 KB USED FLASH MEMORY
BY BOOTLOADER

2 KB (ATMEGA328) SRAM

1 KB (ATMEGA328) EEPROM

16 MHZ CLOCK SPEED

C. Raspberry-pi
The Raspberry Pi is a small, powerful and lightweight ARM
based computer which can do many of the things a desktop PC
can do. The powerful graphics capabilities and HDMi video

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 Figure 5
3-way Electro Magnetic Valve
3-Way Electromagnetic Valves have three pipe connections
and two orifices. When one orifice is open, the other is closed
and vice versa.Which is automatically controlled by the water
requirement of sensor node.

V. CONTROL SYSTEM

Figure7
ARDUINO UNO and SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR

The RASPBERRY-Pi is used for control the

Figure6 irrigation system and connects with internet to send data to the
FUNCTIONAL BLOCK DIAGRAM registered mobile number. Automatic message sending is
developed using python programming in raspberry-pi. If the
Soil moisture sensors are used to sense the moisture level in farmer is far away from his field he always update with his
soil and send the data to wireless network device and the data field status through mobile message or Gmail. The raspberry-
from network device send to ARDUINO-UNO where an pi check the condition in which direction of the farm field is
ATMEGA-328 Microcontroller process the data and calculate dry then it open the electromagnetic valve at the
the percentage of dryness. The sensor data are voltage values correspondence direction and then ON the pump.
so calculating percentage of dryness from voltage values using
an algorithm
Voltage= sensor value*(5/1023) VI. PROPOSED SYSTEM
Percent= (voltage/5)*100 In a large area of farm field there is use a large number of
The ARDUINO board has 10-bit analog to digital pipes for watering plants in different directions from the
converter.This means that it will map input voltages between 0 socket of motor. Which is changed by the farmer to irrigate a
and 5 volts into integer values between 0 and 1023.This yields particular direction of the field. But use of electromagnetic
a resolution between readings of: 5 volts / 1024 units or, .0049 valve the pipe system are always connected and
volts (4.9 mV) per unit.It takes about 100 microseconds electromagnetic valve automatically change the direction of
(0.0001 s) to read an analog input, so the maximum reading the water required area of the field and the valve is controlled
rate is about 10,000 times a second [8]. Which generate a large by the Raspberry-Pi. While the valve is open then the water
number of data so we take a delay of 5minute. In each 5 motor ON automatically. And send a message to the registered
minutes ARDUINO give one output value of percentage in mobile number and registered g-mail account. By which
dryness. The value of dryness fed to the Raspberry-Pi to farmer know the status of the farm field while farmer far away
control the electromagnetic valve and operate motor. User from field.
knows the status of the farm field through a message to the
registered mobile number. In a irregular surface of the field there are use a large number
of sensors and wireless networking devices which is increase
the cost of the smart system. So in this we focus to decrease
the number of sensors and wireless network devices. The farm
field covered by the set of n sensors distributed randomly over
a 2-D plane. Normally farm fields are irregular in surface area.
So change inside of an irregular surface area to square. which
is shown in Figure 8.

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 Figure10

A two-tire WSN is formed by grouping sensor nodes into

Figure 8 clusters in the lower tire. In each cluster there is a cluster
Irregular area and less number of sensors use head(CH) and remaining nodes are cluster members(CMs).
Sensors are deployed in each corner of the irregular area and CMs collect the data and send to the CH. The CH then send
then design the inside of an irregular surface like square and the aggregated data to the sink directly or via other CH. There
then sensors are deployed in each corner of the square. Which are two types of communication between CH and sink i.e.,
required less number of sensors. Each sensor node connect single-hop communication and multi-hop communication. In
with a wireless network devices. single-hop the CH directly connect to sink and the multi-hop
A. Network Model the CH connect via other CH to sink. Each CH distributes and
transmits the data packet to the sink so that the load of the
forwarding nodes is balanced and the energy consumed by the
An algorithm called Local Shortest Path(LSP) use for control
CH is minimized in the process of data routing[13].
in wireless multiple networks. In this algorithm each WSN
device computes the shortest paths connecting itself to the B. Energy Model
nearby WSN devices based on some link weight function[17]. The energy model of the sensor node is adopted from [16].
7KH HQHUJ\ FRQVXPHG WR WUDQVPLW ȕ-bit data packet over the
distance D (i,j) where D (i,j) is the distance between the node i
and j is given as
2
(ߙ‫ ݔݐ‬+ ߝ݂‫݅(ܦ ݏ‬,݆ ) )ߚ ‫݅(ܦ‬,݆ ) < ݀0
E tx (i,j)=ቊ 4 (1)
(ߙ‫ ݔݎ‬+ ߝ݉‫݅(ܦ ݌‬,݆ ) )ߚ ‫݅(ܦ‬,݆ ) ൒ ݀0

Where ߙ‫ ݔݐ‬and ߙ‫ ݔݎ‬are the energy dissipated in transmitting

and receiving the data bit respectively. If the distance between
the sensor and receiver is less than ݀0 then free space ߝ݂‫ݏ‬
channel model is used. Otherwise multi path fading ߝ݉‫݌‬
channel model is used. the energy consumed in receiving the
ȕ-bit data is given by

E rx (j)= Į rx ȕ (2)
Figure 9

The sensor nodes and wireless network devices are powered VII. COST ANALYSIS
by battery with limited power source. Therefore, the energy In a smart irrigation system there are used a very high cost
consumption of the sensor nodes is treated as the most serious instruments to control the system. But here we use a very low
issue for the long operation of the WSN. Clustering WSN cost hardwires which are easily a INDIAN farmer buy and
devices is an efficient technique which is known for energy implement in farm field. Decreasing the number of sensors are
saving of the sensor nodes[13]. also for a cost effective of the smart irrigation system.

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 [2] water conservation potential of landscape irrigation smart controllers (m.
TOTAL QUANTITY UNIT COST COMPONENT d. dukes)
COST
[3] Advance in Electronic and Electric Engineering.ISSN 2231-1297,
Volume 4, Number 4 (2014), pp. 341-346Solar Powered Smart Irrigation
RS.200.00 1 RS.200.00 SOIL MOISTURE System S. Harishankar1, R. Sathish Kumar2, Sudharsan K.P, U. Vignesh
SENSOR
and T.Viveknath
[4] International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer and
RS.1000.00 1 RS.1000.00 ARDUINO Communication Engineering (IJIRCCE) Prototype for Automatic
Controlling and Remote Accessing of Irrigation MotorR.Jaichandran1,
RS.3000.00 1 RS.3000.00 RASPBERRY- Dr. A. Anthony Irudhayaraj2, Surabhi3, Rajkumar Kuila4, Trisha Sinha5
PI
[5] Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 14, 141–156, 2010 Soil moisture active and
passive microwave products: intercomparison and evaluation over a
RS.700.00 1 RS.700.00 MODEM Sahelian site C. Gruhier1, P. de Rosnay2, S. Hasenauer3, T. Holmes4, R.
de Jeu5, Y. Kerr1, E. Mougin1, E. Njoku6, F.Timouk1,W. Wagner3, and
RS.1300.00 1 RS.1300.00 MONITOR M. Zribi1
[6] soil moisture estimation using remote sensing (Jeffrey Walker1and Paul
3-Way Solenoid Houser2)
RS 5000.00 1 RS 5000.00
Valve [7] International Journal of Environmental Research and Development.
Wireless ISSN 2249-3131 Volume 4, Number 4 (2014), pp. 371-374 Smart
RS 1300.00 1 RS 1300.00
NetworkDevice Irrigation Control System Mr. Deepak Kumar Roy and Mr.Murtaza
Hassan Ansari.
These are the approximation value of the used hardware in a
[8] The Arduino Playground (http://playground.arduino.cc/)
smart irrigation system which total is approximately
[9] RASPBERRY-Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/)
Rs.15,000.00-20,000.00. This is very low in cost and easily
[10] Practical Programming Second Edition An introduction to Computer
implement in a farm field. Science Using Python 3, Paul Gries, Jennifer Campbell, Jason Montojo,
Edited by Lynn Beighley
[11] An introduction to the Linux Command Shell for Beginners, Presented
VIII. CONCLUSION by: (Victor Gedris)
In this paper we present a prototype for automatic controlling [12] Linux Fundamentals (Paul Cobbaut)
a irrigation system. Here prototypes includes sensor node and [13] ©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014, Energy-Aware
Multi-level Routing Algorithm for Two-tire wireless Sensor Networks
control node. The sensor node is deployed in irrigation field Tarachand Amgoth1,Nabin Ghosh2,Prasant K. Jana1
for sensing soil moisture value and the sensed data is sent to [14] ©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014, Minimum Range
controller node.On receiving sensor value the controller node Assignment Problem for Two Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks
checks it with required soil moisture value. When soil Bhawani Sankar Panda and D. Pushparaj Sethy Computer science and
moisture in irrigation field is not up to the required level then Application Group,Department of Mathematics,IIT Delhi
the motor is switched on to irrigate associated agriculture field [15] A Shortest-Path-Based Topology Control Algorithm in
Wireless Multihop Networks Yao Shen,Yunze Cai,Xiaoming Xu Dept.
and alert message is send to registered mobile phone. The of Automation,Shanghai Jiaotong Univ. Shanghai 200240, China
experimental results show that the prototype is capable for [16] Heinzelman, W.B., Chandrakasan, A.,Balakrishnan,H.: Energy-efficient
automatic controlling the experimental results show that the communication protocols for wireless micro sensor networks. In:
prototype is capable for automatic controlling of irrigation Proceeding of Hawaii International conference on System Science(2000)
motor based on the feedback of soil moisture sensor. This [17] ©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014, A Digital-
Geometric Approach for Computing Area Coverage in Wireless Sensor
system is used in a remote area and there are various benefits Networks Dibakar Saha1,Nabanita Das2,Shyamosree
for the farmers. By using the automatic irrigation system it
optimizes the usage of water by reducing wastage and
reduce the human intervention for farmers. It saves energy
also as it automatic controlling the system. So there are the
system is OFF when the field is wet and automatically start
when the field id dry. It is implemented in all type of irrigation
system (channel, sprinkler, drip). And we present also less
number of sensor nodes to use in a large area of field so the
cost of the system also decrease. And power consumption of
the wireless network devices are also less and the system
perform a long time function.

REFERENCES

[1] International journal of engineering sciences & research

technology(IJESRT) survey of smart irrigation system h.n.kamalaskar*
dr. p.h.zope** issn: 2277-9655

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