See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261470241 Automated irrigation system using solar power Conference Paper · December 2012 DOI: 10.1109/ICECE.2012.6471527 CITATIONS READS 38 43,216 5 authors, including: Jia Uddin Sharif Muhammad Taslim Reza Woosong University International Islamic University Chittagong 119 PUBLICATIONS 283 CITATIONS 30 PUBLICATIONS 137 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Touhidul Islam Jongmyon Kim University of Rajshahi University of Ulsan 1 PUBLICATION 38 CITATIONS 421 PUBLICATIONS 2,482 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Smart Electricity Meter View project Model-Reference Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control for Robot manipulator View project All content following this page was uploaded by Jia Uddin on 16 January 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. 2012 7th International Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering 20-22 December, 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh 228 Automated Irrigation System Using Solar Power Jia Uddin1, S.M. Taslim Reza2, Qader Newaz2, Jamal Uddin2, Touhidul Islam2, and Jong-Myon Kim1,* 1 School of Electrical Engineering, University of Ulsan, 93 Daehak-ro, Nam-gu, Ulsan 680-749, South Korea 2 Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, International Islamic University Chittagong 154/A, College Road, Chawk Bazar, Chittagong-4200, Bangladesh * jmkim07@ulsan.ac.kr Abstract— This paper proposes a model of variable rate automatic microcontroller based irrigation system. Solar power is used as only the source of power to control the overall system. Sensors are placed on the paddy field and these sensors continuously sense the water level and give the message to the farmer informing the water level. Without visiting the paddy fields, farmers can get the information about the water level. Based on the water level, a farmer can control the motor by sending a message from his cellular phone even from a remote place. However, if the water level reaches to the danger level; the motor will automatically start without confirmation of farmer to ensure the proper water level in the site. At the end of this paper, a complete hardware implementation of this proposed automated irrigation system is presented. Index Terms— Automated Variable Rate Irrigation System, Solar Power, Sensor, Dual Tone Multi Frequency (DTMF). I. INTRODUCTION The continuously increasing demand of the food necessitates the rapid improvement in food production technology. In most of the developing countries such as Bangladesh, national economy mainly depends on the Agriculture. But these countries do not able to make proper use of agricultural resources due to the high dependency on rain [1]. Nowadays different irrigation systems are used to reduce the dependency of rain and mostly the existing irrigation systems are driven by electrical power and manually ON/OFF scheduling controlled [2]. Farmers usually control the electric motors observing the soil, crop and weather conditions by visiting the sites [3]. These manually controlled irrigation systems cannot ensure a proper level of water in the site [4-7]. Due to the lack of electricity and mismanagement in the manually controlling systems, sometimes their fields become dry and sometimes flooded with excess water [8]. These unplanned and manually controlled irrigation systems also cause a significant amount of water waste [9]. Automatic irrigation system is usually designed for ensuring the proper level of water for growing up the plants all through the season. Even when the farmers are away, these automatic irrigation systems always ensure the proper level of water in the sites [10]. In addition, it provides maximum water usage efficiency by monitoring soil moistures at optimum level [11]. Several research works have reputed aspects of development of automated irrigation system [1, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18]. With the development of technology in water saving irrigation and automation, automatic irrigation is going to be more popular in the farms. For example, a GSM based automatic irrigation water control is proposed [15]. A mobile irrigation system has been developed which improves water efficiency by saving the water [16]. Artificial Neural * Corresponding author. 978-1-4673-1436-7/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE Network (ANN) based intelligent control system is proposed for effective irrigation scheduling in paddy fields [1, 17]. In the past, most of the proposed irrigation models are driven by electricity and their corresponding automated hardware are fixed rate. And these models are highly expensive as those were made of expensive devices. Thus, due to higher cost, the general farmers cannot buy it for their use; usually these models are used in the farms only for experiment or demonstration funded by government or any private organization. On the other hand, the variable rate automated controlling approach improves the overall irrigation system reducing the total cost and increases the production of crop yield [17]. Therefore, low price, alternative source of electricity and variable rate automated operation are the key concerns in the design of an irrigation system for the common farmers. In this paper, we propose a solar power controlled automated irrigation system. Sensors collect the information about the water level of paddy fields and update the farmer as well as the microcontroller. The farmer can switch ON and OFF the motor based on the water level even from distant places using a cell phone. However, if the water level reaches to the danger level, then the motor will automatically start to ensure the proper water level in the paddy field. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the proposed model with a block diagram; circuit components with detail description are presented in Section III. Additionally, hardware implementation of the proposed model is demonstrated in this section. Finally, Section IV concludes the paper. II. PROPOSED MODEL A complete block diagram of proposed automated irrigation system is illustrated in Fig. 1. The area of paddy field usually may cover up several hundreds of hectares; to cover the whole area we need to place different sensors in the paddy field. The sensors will always sense the water level of the field and will send a message to the user’s cell phone to inform the condition of irrigation through the DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) signalling. Farmer will control the motor sending assigned code to the microcontroller. A Photo Voltaic (PV) cell is the only source of energy to drive this proposed system. The energy will be stored in the DC Battery through power supply. The sensors, microcontroller and cell phone interface are driven by DC power. However, pump is driven by AC power; inverter is used to convert DC to AC power, and AC power interface ensures the proper AC power supply to the pump. 229 Inverter AC power Interface Sensor Micro Controller PV Cell Power Supply Pump Cell Phone Cell Phone Interface Battery Fig. 1 Block diagram of proposed circuit model III. DESCRIPTION OF PROPOSED MODEL A. Circuit detail of Proposed Model In this section, different circuit components of our proposed model are illustrated in Fig. 2- Fig. 7. Normally, sensor is a device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a signal which can be read by an observer/ instrument. In this paper, we propose a model of designing sensor as presented in Fig. 2. Two metal plates such as A and B are used to form a sensor; at where 5V DC power is attached with plate A, and plate B is connected with a microcontroller. Normally plate A and plate B are isolated from each other and no voltage signal passes to the microcontroller. When the water fills the gap, the metal plates A and B gets connection and voltage signal passes to the microcontroller. +5v A B MCU Fig. 2 Sensor connections to microcontroller According to our design model, if the water level reaches to 0cm, the microcontroller will automatically start the pump through AC interface according to the command of the pin RA4 as depicted in Fig. 3. The farmer will be confirmed by a message; for example, PUMP STARTED. AC interface usually consists of a relay which is operated by the microcontroller and used to control the pump as presented in Fig. 4. The pump will remain switched ON until the water level reaches to the secured level 10cm. When the sensors sense the water level is above 10cm, microcontroller will make the pump to be switched OFF; as it is receiving the status of water level from the sensors. At the secure level (10cm) the microcontroller will not operate. However, if the water level goes down to mid level (3cm) the sensors will send a signal to the microcontroller through the pin 12 (RB6) as depicted in Fig. 3. After receiving the signal the microcontroller will send a message (for example, WATER LEVEL LOW) to the user’s cell phone through the cell phone interface. Fig. 3 Control module of the system The cell phone interface usually consists of an optocoupler which is connected with the keypad of the cell phone as depicted in Fig. 5. The microcontroller will seek the decision from the farmer through a message; whether he wants to start the pump or not. In our propose model, an individual code is assigned for each user. If the farmer wants to start the pump, he will send a message with the assigned code to the microcontroller through the DTMF decoder. The circuit detail of a balanced-line mode DTMF is illustrated in Fig. 6. To reject the common-mode noise signals, a balanced differential amplifier input is used. The circuit also provides an excellent bridging interface across a properly terminated telephone line. Whenever the farmer presses any key on his mobile phone keypad, the delayed steering (Std) output of the IC (Integrated Circuit) goes high on receiving the tone-pair, and glow the LED15 (connect with pin15 of IC via resistor R15) for a duration depending on the value of capacitor and resistor connected with pins 16 and 17. The LEDs connected with resistors R11-R14 at pins 11-14, indicate the output of the IC. The tone pair of DTMF generated by pressing the telephone button is converted into binary values internally in the IC. Fig. 4 AC Interface 230 Fig. 5 Cell phone interface Fig. 8 Proposed Sensor with two metal plates Fig. 6 Dual Tone Multi Frequency Decoder The binary values are indicated by glowing LEDs at the output pins of the IC. For example, if the farmer dials a number 5, LED12 and LED14 will glow as corresponding binary value is 0101. Similarly, for any other number, the corresponding LEDs will glow. Thus, a non-defective IC should indicate the proper binary values corresponding to the decimal numbers pressed on the telephone key-pad. The microcontroller will start the pump if it gets the correct code. However, the microcontroller will automatically switch ON the pump if water level reaches to the danger level even if the farmer does not send the code. Fig. 9 Irrigation water pump Fig. 10 A complete implementation of proposed model Fig. 7 Solar energy supply system A small PV (Photo Voltaic) cell (6V) is connected with a battery through the charge controller. A solar energy supply system is demonstrated in Fig. 7, at where the charge controller will limit the rate of current is added to or drawn from the battery to prevent the overcharging of battery. The voltage regulator will always maintain a constant 5V supply to the module. B. Hardware implementation of proposed model In this section, hardware implementation of propose automated irrigation model is presented in Figs. 8-11. The hardware implementation of our propose sensor using two metal plates is presented in Fig. 8. Figure 9 illustrates the small water pump which we used for our experiment. Figure 10 shows the complete hardware implementation of propose system which can ensure the proper water level in the paddy field. C. Flow diagram of proposed model Figure 11 illustrates a flow diagram of propose automated irrigation model. Where, T and F stand for True (desired level of water exist) and False (desired level of water does not exist), respectively. At first the microcontroller will check the status of mid sensor (3cm). If mid sensor senses the water level that means sufficient level of water exists in the paddy site, the microcontroller will not initiate any decision. However, if the water level reaches below the mid sensor it will send a message seeking decision from the farmer. If the farmer sends a message with his assigned code, the pump will start and will run till reaches to the high sensor (10cm). Conversely, if the farmer does not send a message, then the microcontroller will wait for the command until the water reaches to the low sensor (0cm). If the water falls down to low sensor the pump will automatically start and continue till water level reaches to high sensor. In this way the loop will be continuously followed by the microcontroller. 231 [5] Start [6] T Mid Sensor [7] F [8] Send Message [9] Get Code Yes [11] No T [10] Low Sensor F Start Pump [12] [13] [14] F High Sensor [15] T Stop Fig. 11 Flow diagram of propose model IV. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, an automated irrigation model is proposed and successfully implemented using different circuits as demonstrated in different figures. We designed and implemented this model considering low cost, reliability, alternate source of electric power and automatic control. As the proposed model is automatically controlled it will help the farmers to properly irrigate their fields. The model always ensures the sufficient level of water in the paddy field avoiding the under-irrigation and over-irrigation. Farmers can remotely ON/OFF the motor by using cell phone even from away. The system is secured with password for the restricted number of users. 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