Internet of Things Applied to Precision Agriculture

Nowadays, the number of small family farms has grown considerably and it represents the main type of agricultural enterprise in the world. The family activity in agriculture is considered significant in terms of production of strategic food for the population, mainly in developing countries. Small family farmers, in general, are always on influence of weather, and as a consequence, usually they do not maximize the harvest, reducing then the incoming. Analyzing the small family farming current context, this paper proposes the development of a low-cost solution for control, monitoring and automation of agricultural greenhouse. The proposed solution was designed using prototyping as Raspberry Pi (RPi) and Arduino in conjunction with sensors (temperature, humidity, and light, among others) and few actuators (drip system, fans and incandescent lamps). For interaction between the farmer and the systems, it was developed a web human machine interface. Currently there is a prototype of the proposed system running in the campus facilities of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) - Ararangua. Performance and stability tests were made in the system in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture. As a conclusion, with this study developed using sensors and actuators in a controlled environment prototype, it is possible to conclude that low cost solutions for family farms are extremely necessary and feasible.