2010 International Conference on Measuring Technology and Mechatronics Automation

Wireless Measurement and Control System for Environmental Parameters in Greenhouse

Yang Shulian, Zhang Yu
Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, Shandong, 255049, China yangsl21cn@163.com takes charge of collecting temperature, humility, carbon dioxide and other parameters, and transmit these parameters to centralized control unit by wireless sending modules; on the other hand, it takes charge of carrying out the instructions sending by PC and then to adjust these parameters. Centralized control unit not only summarizes the data collecting by every terminal and transmits these parameters to PC, but also receives control instructions from PC and also sends it to every terminal to adjust the environment parameters of every terminal. The PC collects the environment parameters of every terminal, handles and displays it, which gives all kinds of control instruction according to these parameters. Serial communication circuit achieves the level conversion between the microcontroller and the PC in order to realize the communication between them.

Abstract According to the environmental parameters monitoring requirements in greenhouse, a wireless measurement and control system for temperature and humidity is developed. It overcomes the disadvantages of wired monitoring system, such as complicated wiring, and difficult maintenance. The environmental parameters in every greenhouse were measured and controlled by microcontroller. The hardware and software of the monitoring system are discussed in detail. The experimental results show that the developed monitoring system has the following features, such as simple structure, high reliability, good extensibility and flexible configuration. It can control and adjust automatically the environmental parameters in every greenhouse, and has project practicality and vendibility. Keywords Greenhouse; temperature and humidity; Wireless transmitting and receiving; measurement and control; nRF905

I.

INTRODUCTION
Terminal 1 Terminal 2 Terminal n

For the large rural distract, the greenhouse production has become a way of being rich. The growth of crop in greenhouse depends on temperature, humility and other parameters in greenhouse. So it is important to real-timely and properly measure and adjust the temperature, humility and other parameters in the greenhouse. With the continued expansion of production scale, the disadvantages of traditional wire monitoring system are more and more prominent, such as complicated arrangement, difficult maintenance and so on. Then the wireless monitoring system is developed, which based on wireless communication technology, does not need cables, adds or reduces configuration at random, possess simple system construction. Moreover, it is characterized by its low power consumption, simple net construction. Therefore, it proves to be simple and of practical significance[1-3]. A greenhouse environment parameters monitoring system based on wireless communication technology has been developed, which realizes the measurement, summary and control of temperature, humility and the other parameters. II. GENERAL SYSTEM The diagram of monitoring system for environment parameters in greenhouse is shown in figure 1. It includes every terminal, centralized control unit, PC and serial communication circuits. On the one hand, every terminal
978-0-7695-3962-1/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICMTMA.2010.171 1099

PC

RS232C

Centralized control unit

. . .

Terminal 3

Terminal 4

Figure 1. Block diagram of general system.

III. A.

DESIGN OF FUNCTION MODULE

Centralized control unit Centralized control unit consists of microcontroller and radio frequency transceivers. Microcontroller as the control center, not only controls the transmission and receiving of radio frequency signal; but also communicates with the PC. Considering energy-saving of the entire system, the microcontroller of STC12LE5410AD is selected which is driven by power supply of 3.2V. It consists of the following features: 8051 core, 8 channels and 10 bits ADC, 4 channels PWM output, 521 Bytes of on board RAM, 10K program memory, watchdog, integrated special reset circuit of

MAX810, two 16 bits timers/counters, 2 channels interrupt, full duplex UART, can be set as single clock machine cycle (1T), and is 8 to12 times than the 51 family microcontroller in speed. According to the systemic design principle in high stabilization and low power consumption, the nRF905 is practically selected. It is a single chip radio transceiver for the 433/868/915MHz ISM band. The transceiver consists of a fully integrated frequency synthesizer, receiver chain with demodulator, a power amplifier, a crystal oscillator and, a modulator. The ShockBurst feature automatically handles preamble and CRC. You can easily configure the nRF905 through the SPI. Current consumption is very low, in transmit only 9mA at an output power of -10dBm, and in receive mode 12.5mA. Built-in power down modes makes power saving easily realizable. With the increase of the number of greenhouse, and being greater the area of its cover, the transmission power of nRF905 does not meet the actual demand, thus the circuit of amplifying power based on the chip of PA2423L is designed to improve systemic output power and realize further receiving and transmission distance. B. Measurement and control unit The block diagram of every measurement and control terminal is showed in figure 2. It mainly includes data acquisition subsystems, control subsystems, wireless communication subsystems and power supply subsystem. It is mainly used to measure the temperature and humility indoors and outdoors and carbon dioxide concentration indoors, to control heaters, exhaust fans, humidifiers and transmit these data. The microcontroller and radio frequency transceivers in this section are selected as same as in the section A. The measurement and control module of environment parameters is only explained as follows.

0%~100% RH, precision is 2.0% RH; repeatability precision is 0.1% RH; the output is digital signal. (2)The concentration sensor of CO2 is chosen as infrared CO2 sensor of C20 which produced by the British GSS Company. Its main performance index are: measuring range is 0~5000ppm; precision is 10ppm; response time is less than 4s; power supply is 3.3V DC; average power consumption is less than 100mW; serial input and output are in TTL level or analog voltage of 0~5V. The controlling members of greenhouse for environment parameters consist of the controlling of heater, exhaust fan and humidifier. With the temperature, humidity and co2 concentration are not suitable for the growth of crops, the PC can send out instructions to control solid state relay, then the heater, exhaust fan and humidifier are turned on by solid state relay; Otherwise these controllers are turned out . C. Power supply unit The power supply consist of a lithium battery with capacity of 1200 mAh, intelligent battery monitoring IC of DS2762, battery protection IC of R5426, battery charge management IC of BQ2057, etc. It provides the necessary energy and intelligent charging and short circuit protection function for every terminal[4]. D. Serial communication circuit unit The serial communication circuit accomplishes the communication between the PC and microcontroller. The system on the one hand collects the data which every terminal collected; on the other hand controls the action of ach terminal by the instruction of the PC. The connection diagram of serial interface is showed in Figure 3. This serial communication circuit is designed based on RS232C serial interface for data transmission. The conversion between RS232 and TTL level by STC3232, because it is RS232C duplex transmitter/receiver interface chip, which has level multiplication circuit with spontaneously stepping up and only needs a single power supply of +3.3V[5,6].
TXD RXD
STC3232 C

transceiver microcontroller TXD PC Temperature, humidity and CO2 sensors

Figure 2. Diagram of measurement and control unit.

The sensor is chosen in practical application in energy consumption, measuring range and precision, cost and volume, with the performance are shown as follows: (1)Temperature and humidity sensor is chosen as SHT15. its performance index are: temperature measuring range is -40+123.8, the measuring precision is 0.3 at 25 , response time is less than 8 s, average power consumption is 20 W; humidity measuring range is

ADC

Heater, humidifier and exhaust fan

RXD

TXD

Figure 3. Diagram of the connection of serial interface.

IV.

SYSTEMIC SOFTWARE

The systemic software includes data acquisition, data receiving and transmission by wireless and action subprogram of every terminal, communication subprogram between PC and microcontroller, and data processing subprogram by PC. The program of microcontroller and PC are coded by C51 and Visual Basic Language, respectively.

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The PC program consists of parameter setting subprogram, data collection subprogram, data processing subprogram, data management subprogram and control instruction subprogram. Parameter setting subprogram mainly set all kinds of systemic parameters, such as the working mode parameters of every terminal and the sampling time. The data acquisition module achieves synchronously the collection of multi-channel data, real-time display of waveform, etc. Every monitoring parameter is displayed dynamically by real-time graph and table. The data processing module is mainly used to deal with the received data package, such as digital filtering, numerical calculation, scale conversion, logical judgment and so on. The data management module is mainly used to manage the collecting data, including storage, enquiry, printing, data analysis and statistics, etc. The relational database of SQL Server 2000 is used to store and manage the collecting data, graph and table are used to show historical data inquiry information of every monitoring parameter. Every control instruction module sends all kinds of instruction based on the results of the comparison of collected data and the standard value, and it will control the controller of every terminal. A. Main program The main program of the PC achieves data receiving, analysis and storage of every terminal. For the data is beyond the range of a pre-set, the main program sends control instructions to control electrical apparatus of every terminal on or off. The flow chart is followed as Figure4. Start System initiation Opening RS232 series interface Sending data acquisition instructions Receiving data
N

Start C initiation Opening series interface Sending instructions of acquisition data Receiving terminal data Uploading data to PC

Figure 5. flowchart of microcontroller subprogram

C.

Terminal subprogram Every terminal subprogram achieves measurement of all kinds of parameters and transmission of it, and the performance of all kinds of control instructions to adjust all kinds of parameters. The flowchart is followed as Figure 6.
Start Initialization

Data acquisition instruction ?

N
Control instruction

Y Y
Collecting kinds of data Transmitting data

Humidifier instruction

Ventilator instruction

Heater instruction

Data beyond range

Y

Sending control instruction D.

Figure 6. flowchart of terminal subprogram

Figure 4. Flowchart of main program.

B. Microcontroller subprogram The microcontroller subprogram mainly achieves the receiving of data from every terminal and transmission of instruction from PC, it is the connective ligament of every terminal and the PC. The flowchart is followed as Figure 5.
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Systemic testing result The experiment is done on the system at vegetable base Shouguang, Shandong province. The test results for the developed system at a moment are shown in table 1.There are 5 greenhouses are located in the circumference of a radius of 1km, every greenhouse can collect environmental temperature, airy humidity, concentration of CO2 indoors.

The data sampling interval of the system is of 20 minutes. The acquisition data are sent to central control unit by every terminal controller, and then also sent to the PC by the central unit. The data can be stored, displayed, analyzed, inquired and printed by the software of the PC.
TABLE 1. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS OF THE SYSTEM.

Greenhouse No. Temperature ()

Humidity (RH)

Concentration of CO2 (ppm)

1 22.3 47% 1300 2 23.6 50% 1356 3 25.0 48% 1387 4 24.5 53% 1428 5 24.7 51% 1454 The test results showed that the lithium cell with capacity of 1200mAh can only remain two days every terminal when there is not low power consumption measure. With taking the low power consumption measure that controlling sampling interval and adopting dormancy, a lithium cell after charging can remains more than half of a year for every terminal. V. CONCLUSION

The measurement and control system for environment parameters in greenhouse based on wireless communication technology is developed and initially experimented. The experimental results indicate that the system has some features as follows: (1) It is applied to agriculture vegetable greenhouse can commendably overcome the disadvantage of traditional measuring and controlling system in greenhouses. (2) It can be kept long distance, real time monitoring for parameter of greenhouse and the information can be obtained of greenhouse at any time. (3) It has the advantages of not needing cables, low power consumption, cheap cost, good robustness, flexible extension, convenient installing over the traditional measurement and control system. REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Kang Weixin. Design of Charged Wireless Communication Interface Based on Bluetooth Technique. Heilongjiang Institute of Technology, 200216(3):24-26. Tan Liang , Hu Ji. Design of the Wireless Multi - Point Temperature Gathering System Based on nRF9E5, Journal of Hangzhou Dianzi University, 2006,8(4):31-34. Zhu Weihua. Design of Wireless Data collection System Based on Single RF Transceiver. Nanhua University, 200317(2):6-9. Zhang Baohua, Li Shining, Teng Wenxing, and etc. Development and design of greenhouse testing and control system based on wireless sensor networks. Microelectronics & computer 2008 25(5): 154-157. Zhang Weigang. Communication principle and technology. Xian: Xidian university press,2002,pp.182-185. Li Wenzhong. Short-range wireless data communication entry and the actual combat [M]. Bei hang University Press,2002, pp89-93.

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