Internet of Things for Irrigation Monitoring and Controlling

The three things that the world runs on are water, wheel, and fire. Agriculture is largely based on water, its proper usage, storage, and management. This is a very key issue. With the advent of technology, manual systems evolved from being mechanized to being automatic and recently to being smart. The technology wave of Internet of Things can further ease the tedious task of watering and irrigating the fields, especially in the water scarce regions as well as in situations where fields are far away from residential areas. Also it saves the excess use of water for any crop. Erratic climate behavior in the Indian subcontinent in the last few years has led to extreme water scarcity in many regions. This paper proposes an irrigation monitoring and controlling system based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Internet of Things. The WSN remotely collects the data from the fields and transfers it to the cloud. The wireless sensor network uses two sensors: DHT and soil moisture sensor. A management server accesses the information over the cloud, a graphics user interface processes it and generates a feedback. This feedback is based on a user-selected crop name (stored in database) in the GUI. The information is sent over the cloud via IoT gateway. In this work, the hotspot from the mobile phone is used as an IoT gateway. The ESP8266-12E is used as controller as well as a Wi-Fi module. The feedback device is a 12 V DC pump. Whenever the soil moisture level senses dry soil (0-min %), the management system will generate a feedback signal to switch on the pump.