Development of an IoT-Based SCADA System for Monitoring of Plant Leaf Temperature and Air and Soil Parameters

Plant leaf temperature and its environmental parameters provide valuable information on plant growth. This paper presents the development of a plant monitoring system using an IoT-based SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition). The developed SCADA system monitors the leaf temperature and the air parameters of temperature and humidity, as well as the soil parameters of temperature, moisture, pH, electrical conductivity, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. A novel method is proposed for measuring the leaf temperature using a low-cost 8 x 8 array thermal camera. The sensor systems in the field are developed to wirelessly communicate with the Hawell IoT Cloud HMI via a Modbus TCP protocol. To visualize the thermal image on the HMI dashboard, a novel approach is proposed wherein the data are transferred using the Modbus TCP protocol. The HMI is connected to a cloud server and can be accessed by the users using the web browser or mobile application on a smartphone. The experimental results show that the proposed hardware, software, and communication protocol are reliable for real-time and continuous plant monitoring. Further, the evaluation of sensor data shows that the data from the thermal camera and air parameters sensor can be independently interpreted. However, the data from the soil sensor should be interpreted in consideration of the other parameters.