Automatic Plant Watering System for Small Farms - Using Arduino
IT 140 CAPSTONE AND RESEARCH 1
By
ABALDE, JOENALD
ENANOR, JAYVA
TORES, PATRICK DOMINIC
JOHN ED AUGUSTUS A. ESCORIAL, MIT
Faculty
Chapter I – INTRODUCTION
Project Context
In a world where technology and innovation are visibly changing the way we
live and work, one of the best things to effectively use these advantages is applying it
on the most important part of our lives in order to survive where we can be able to get
the food we eat.
It is evident that technology offers multiple solutions in different areas such as
healthcare, education, security, smart cities and agriculture. It is considered to be an
ideal solution in agriculture for the areas that are continuously monitoring and
controlling.
Farms and gardens are considered to be one of the sources of foods in general.
Traditional way of taking care of these plants is through manually monitoring and
watering it but with this proposed project that we are developing is capable of
watering and monitoring of plants that will be manage by the system itself. It is
indeed time friendly since you can just let the system handle the work and you can
now have a huge time to spend for yourself and other activities. It is a great way of
installing something that would help maintain the growth of plants on small farms.
Purpose and Description
This Automatic Plant Watering System is programmed using Arduino IDE
software to automatically water the plants. This system will have the ability to check
the temperature, moisture level of the soil, time and other factors that would help the
longevity of plant’s life. This can help the person in charge to do their respective
agendas without worrying and just let this system handle the watering.
Objectives
General Objective
The general objective of this project is to execute an automatic
watering to plants form the data gathered using Arduino.
Specific Objectives
1. Get the environment conditions
2. Get the moisture level of the soil
3. Get the time of watering
4. Alarm when the tanks are running out of water
5. Can be able to water the plants
Scope and Limitations
The system that will be develop will focus on the automatic watering to plants.
It will be developed as a both mini-machine and system. The Automatic Plant
Watering System aims to sustain the lives of plants. The study is limited to having a
machine that can water plants from the data gathered of calculating the temperature,
time, and moisture level of water since these factors are considered in plants survival.
It does not seek to include a voice command and sms notification but we are looking
forward to it during the building process.
Significance of the Project
The project has already been built and done but we wish to include some other
features like an alarm to notify the owner about the water level in tanks. We also love
the idea of sustaining the life of the plants since it is timely as these past months were
#LetTheEarthBreathe shocks the social media world. Sustaining the life of the things
that also contribute to our lives is one of our agenda in this study.
Definition of Terms
Arduino -
Arduino is an open-source hardware and software
company, project, and user community that designs and
manufactures single-board microcontrollers and
microcontroller kits for building digital devices.
IDE-
An integrated development environment is a software
application that provides comprehensive facilities to
computer programmers for software development. An
IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor,
build automation tools and a debugger.
#LetTheEarthBreathe- Let the Earth Breathe campaign became viral on social
media as various scientists were arrested and got
desperate in telling and informing people as they
present climate crisis and claiming that we only have
four (4) to five (5) years left before the worst things
could happen if we will not fight against
Sms-
SMS stands for Short Message Service and is
commonly known as texting. It's a way to send textonly messages of up to 160 characters between phones.
Chapter II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter indicates the literature and proposed systems related to Automatic Plant
Watering System.
Arathi Reghukumara, Vaidehi Vijayakumarb [2019], proposed a Smart Plant
Watering System with Cloud Analysis and Plant Health Prediction that analyzes sensor
readings and decide when to water the plants and predicts the general health status of the
plant. They used numbers of sensors in measuring the moisture levels of soil and
environment conditions and sets various growth conditions that required for optimal growth
of the plants for predicting plant’s status. Some other features are added on their system,
these are Automatic start and stop of electric motor based on water threshold value existing
already in the plant. Flame detector accompanied by a buzzer to set off an alarm in case of
fire. E-mail alert sent to the farmer regarding the current health of the plant based on certain
optimal conditions that are required for plant’s sustainability. The proposed system revealed
that the added features are effective in monitoring the plant’s status and it is indeed
innovative, timesaving, user-friendly, in addition to being more cost-efficient than the
currently existing systems.
In 2021, M Astutiningtyas, M Nugraheni, S Suyoto also proposed a similar watering
system but added features such as a real-time feedback from garden sensors, park monitoring,
application-controlled water systems, and automatic watering systems. Further J. Daniel
Francis Selvaraj, P.Mano Paul, I. Diana Jeba Jingle [2019] proposed an Automatic Wireless
Water Management System(AWWMS) for Smart Vineyard Irrigation using IoT Technology
which uses IoT technology in monitoring moisture level of the soil and a Cloud server for
storing the data and controlling the usage of waterflow. It also uses real-time data on air
humidity, soil moisture and environment conditions using sensors to monitor them
automatically.
As seen above some of the other proposed watering systems do not have the ability to
alarm or notify the person in charge when the water level on water tanks is running out, this I
think is one of the feature to add since water is the main source of this system and that should
be look after. The water flow will also be designed in rain like, to disseminate water
efficiently and to occupy a wider range. User friendly is one of are target approaches since
this will be implemented on farms and will be use by the farmers and we think that it would
be better if it will be designed simply but potentially usable.
REFERENCES
Arathi Reghukumar, Vaidehi Vijayakumar,” Smart Plant Watering System with Cloud
Analysis and Plant Health Prediction”, Procedia Computer Science, Volume 165, 2019,
Pages 126-135, ISSN 1877-0509, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2020.01.088
Astutiningtyas, M. B. I., Nugraheni, M. M., & Suyoto, S. (2021). “Automatic Plants
Watering System for Small Garden.” International Journal of Interactive Mobile
Technologies (iJIM), 15(02), pp. 200–207. https://doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v15i02.12803
J. Daniel Francis Selvaraj1*, P.Mano Paul2 , I. Diana Jeba Jingle “Automatic Wireless Water
Management System(AWWMS) for Smart Vineyard Irrigation using IoT Technology”,
International Journal of Oceans and Oceanography ISSN 0973-2667 Volume 13, Number 1
(2019), pp. 211-218 http://www.ripublication.com/ijoo19/ijoov13n1_17.pdf
Chapter III – METHODOLOGY
3.1 SDLC MODEL
We believe that the best SDLC Methodology for this project is Agile Method. This
helps us break down the several phases and serves as the blueprint for team cycle from planning,
developing, and evaluating the project. It also focuses on team works which values collaborative
efforts for we believe that unity will bring success to one goal and that is to build a significant project
for the society.
3.2 Phases of SDLC
3.2.1 Planning Phase
In this phase, it is considered to be one of the crucial parts which is very important for
the researches to deeply understand the project. We wish to build this project (Automatic
Plant Watering System) for the purpose of helping those who are in need especially the
farmers to lessen their work and have more spare time for themselves or other things as well.
Brainstorming is necessary since this allows each member to contribute their thoughts and
suggestions. This phase brought us to breaking down our ideas from having a holistic
understanding of features and requirements for the betterment of the project.
3.2.2 Analysis Phase
This project is intended to be having an automatic watering feature, by that we
believe that this system shall be able to conduct an automatic watering action on plants based
on the monitoring sensors/factors programmed in the system. This shall also conduct an alarm
for the awareness of the person in charge about the low water tank level. This will be
implemented to certain areas or small farms that reach the requirements and capacity of this
project.
3.2.3 Design Phase
We are going to use an Arduino Nano/Uno as the main star of the system. Moisture
sensor to monitor the moisture level of the soil. Ultrasonic sensor for determining the water
level of the tank and responsible for water flow. Tubes/Pipes for the passage of the water and
sprinkler head for a rain like water flow for wider range.
3.2.4 Implementation Phase
The project is usable after some successful testing and assessment to the system itself.
We are also going to provide a manual guide to the end users and conduct an actual
demonstration on how the project is going to be installed and testing for the functionality.