SMART FIELD IRRIGATION SYSTEM

INTERNSHIP PROJECT REPORT

By

ABHIRAMI R (18BSW0059)

DAKOOR SAHARSH (18BSW0075)

SHIRISH KULKARNI (18BSW0078)

School of Electronics

Vellore Institute of Technology

Vellore

October - 2019
 Declaration by Author(s)

This is to declare that this report has been written by me/us. No part of the
report is plagiarized from other sources. All information included from other
sources have been duly acknowledged. I/We aver that if any part of the report is
found to be plagiarized, I/we are shall take full responsibility for it.

ABHIRAMI R

18BSW0059

DAKOOR SAHARSH

18BSW0075

SHIRISH KULKARNI

18BSW0078

VELLORE

22ND OCTOBER 2019

 (A typical specimen of table of contents)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 ABSTRACT.
1.2 INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT.
1.3 COMPONENTS
1.4 RELATED LITERATURE
2. EXPERIMENTATION
2.1 PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
2.2 BLOCK DIAGRAM
2.3 FLOW CHART
2.4 LABVIEW- BLOCK DIAGRAM
2.5 HARDWARE CONNECTIONS
2.6 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
2.6.1 DRY CONDITIONS
2.6.2 WET AND MOIST CONDITIONS
2.7 CONCLUSION

3. REFERENCES.
 1. INTRODUCTION
1.1

ABSTRACT:

The primary objective of this paper is to analyze and monitor the soil’s moisture content
when it is in dry and wet condition, using a soil moisture sensor-based circuit that monitors
the moisture levels and irrigate the field based on its nature using a desktop system with
LabVIEW software and NI myDAQ.
A pump is used to pump the fertilizer and water into the irrigation system. The use of easily
available components reduces the manufacturing and maintenance costs. This makes the
proposed system to be an economical, appropriate and a low maintenance solution for
applications, especially in rural areas and for small scale agriculturists. This research work
enhanced to help the small-scale cultivators and will be increase the yield of the crops then
will increase government economy.

KEYWORDS: LABVIEW, myDAQ, soil moisture sensor, pump

1.2

INTRODUCTION:

Aim is to develop a smart irrigation system to provide irrigation system which is automatic
for the plants which help in saving water and money. The main objective is to apply the
system for improvement of health of the soil and hence the plant via multiple sensors. Fields
should not be either over-irrigated or under-irrigated. Nursery water system licenses farmers
to utilize the right amount of water at the right time, paying little mind to the arrangement of
work to show valves on and off. Moreover, farmer's mistreatment of automation can
downsize overflow from over watering-soaked soils, abstain from flooding at the off-base
time of day, which will improve crop execution by making certain satisfactory water and
supplements once required. Those valves are likewise basically computerized by
mistreatment controllers.
Mechanizing homestead or nursery water system licenses farmers to utilize the right amount
of water at the right time, regardless of the arrangement of work to show valves on and off.
They need an exceedingly highlighted versatile application produced for clients with
adequate User Interface. It exclusively allows the client to watch and keep up the moisture
level remotely in regardless of time. From the motivation behind perusing and performing at
remote places the created small-scale controller principally based water system framework
will work indefinitely for inconclusive essential measure, even in sure strange conditions.
The objective of this thesis is to design a simple, easy to install methodology to
monitor and indicate the level of soil moisture that is continuously controlled in order to
achieve maximum plant growth and simultaneously optimize the available irrigation
resources on monitoring software LabVIEW.
1.3
COMPONENTS:

HARDWARE:
• YL – 69 SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR-
This is an Electrical resistance Sensor. The sensor is consisting of two electrodes. The
soil moisture sensor reads the amount of moisture content around it. A current is
passed across the electrodes through the soil and the resistance to the current in the
soil determines the soil moisture. If the soil has more water then the resistance will be
low and thus more current will pass through. On the other hand, when the soil
moisture is low, the sensor module gives out a high level of resistance. This sensor
has both digital and analogue outputs. Digital output is simple to use but is not as
accurate as the analogue output.

SPECIFICATIONS:
The sensor comes with a small PCB board fitted with LM393 comparator chip and a digital
potentiometer.

YL-69 PCB

Digital potentiometers are also known as a digital pot or digipot. Digipots are used mostly in
scaling analog signals to be used in a microcontroller.

LM 393 COMPARATOR:
A compactor is an electronic device that compares two voltages or currents and gives a
digital signal as the output. It indicates which of the two compared quantities is larger. A
comparator has a least two input pins and one output pin. Operational amplifier operating in
open loop configuration and without negative feedback can be used as a simple comparator.
NI myDAQ:
The above are the specifications and features of NI myDAQ.
1.4

RELATED LITERATURE:

Solar Power Based Smart Irrigation System –

EXPERIMENTED BY- Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Amrita

University Ettimadai, Coimbatore, India.

AIM-Cost effective solar power can be the answer for all our energy needs. Solar powered
smart irrigation systems are the answer to the Indian farmer. This system consists of solar
powered water pump along with an automatic water flow control using a moisture sensor. It
is the proposed solution for the present energy crisis for the Indian farmers. This system
conserves electricity by reducing the usage of grid power and conserves water by reducing
water losses.

They proposed to utilize the solar energy from solar panels to automatically pump water
from bore well directly into a ground level storage tank depending on the intensity of
sunlight. While conventional methods include pumping of water from bore well into a well
and from this well onto field using another pump, our system uses only a single stage energy
consumption wherein the water is pumped into a ground level tank from which a simple
valve mechanism controls the flow of water into the field. This saves substantial amount of
energy and efficient use of renewable energy. A valve is controlled using intelligent
algorithm in which it regulates the flow of water into the field depending upon the moisture
requirement of the land. In this system we use a soil moisture sensor that detects the amount
of moisture present in the soil and depending upon the requirement of level of moisture
content required for the crop the water flow is regulated thus, conserving the water by
avoiding over flooding of crops.
Smart Irrigation System Using Arduino:

JOURNAL-SSRG International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering -

(ICRTECITA-2017) - Special Issue - March 2018

AIM-This paper designs a model of automatic irrigation system which is based on

microcontroller and solar power were used only for source of power supply. Various sensors
are placed in paddy field. Sensors sense water level continuously and give the information to
farmer through cellular phone. Farmer controls the motor using cellular phone without going
in paddy field. If the water level reaches at danger level, automatically motor will be off
without conformation of farmer.
The aim of this paper is to modernize agriculture technology by programming components
and built the necessary component for the system. The system is real time based and extracts
the exact condition of paddy field. There is one central node used which to control another
node. The main function of RF module is to pass the message to the node and operate the
system.
 2. EXPERIMENTATION

2.1
PROPOSED METHODOLOGY:
This project focusses on the fact that the methodology which is implemented here to monitor
the soil’s moisture content, enables agriculturalists and farmers feasibility of humidity/soil
moisture monitoring and a conventional automatic irrigation system with the potential for
eliminating excessive irrigation thereby conserving water to a significant extent. Besides the
normal methods of measurement and analysis, LabVIEW stands unique as a grooming
software in the field of Instrumentation and control engineering, thereby allowing engineers
to work in one platform with infinite possibilities along with a sophisticated control system.
Effective crop treatment and water management is the major requirement in most of the
cultivating estates in semi-arid regions. Monitoring the soil’s nature, estimating its moisture
content and controlling it concurring to the necessity, proposes a potential solution to endorse
landsite irrigation management and thus, to treat desiccated fields and provide prominent
yield to producers. In the field of agriculture, the most important part is, to get the
information about the moisture content of soil.
The project is designed to develop an automatic irrigation system which switches the pump
motor ON/OFF on sensing the moisture content of the soil. In the field of agriculture, use of
proper method of irrigation is important. This project is implemented in the Lab VIEW
environment by interfacing myDAQ. Corresponding to the surface’s atmospheric conditions,
transmission of the sensed voltage signal from the hardware circuitry on the DAQ interfaced
to a PC with Lab VIEW, which uses a development environment that is powerful and
intuitive which could rapidly develop a user interface for data visualization and automatic
irrigation of the soil. The advantage of using this method is to reduce human intervention and
still ensure proper irrigation.
The calibration of soil moisture sensor was done under two conditions: 0% soil moisture and
100% soil moisture. To get soil moisture information the voltage type soil moisture sensors
were used those were capable of generating the voltages output 5V for wet soil i.e. 100%
moisture and 0V for dry soil i.e.0% moisture. Fig 3 shows the variation of generated voltage
by sensors as a function of the soil moisture. The output voltage is fund to be directly
proportional (linear) to the soil moisture.
A calibration factor which is a measure of conversion of soil moisture in percentage is given
by, Soil moisture in % = (Vout / 5) * 100 Where, Vout is the output voltage of a soil moisture
sensor, volts and 5 is the output voltage for 100% soil moisture.

2.2
BLOCK DIAGRAM:

2.3
FLOW CHART:
2.4
LabVIEW – BLOCK DIAGRAM
2.5 HARDWARE CONNECTIONS:

Channels of NI myDAQ are configured as follows:

Acquired Signal → Analog Input → Voltage → select channel ai0 and ai1→ Finish.
Along with that, samples are selected continuously with the read rate kept as 100 and rate
(Hz) as 1K. Voltage input for ai0 is kept in between 0V to 5V.
The connections of the soil moisture sensor to myDAQ are as follows:
Vcc (sensor) → +5V (myDAQ)
GND (sensor) → AGND (myDAQ)
Ao (sensor) → 0+ (myDAQ)
The output of the sensors is displayed on the LABVIEW front panel. The threshold of the soil
moisture level is set accordingly and a Boolean representing the ON/OFF of the Motor is
calibrated.
2.6 RESULTS:

2.6.1
In Dry conditions:
For testing, we set the threshold at 50%. If the soil moisture level is
below 50%, the motor will switch on.
2.6.2
In Wet and Moist conditions:
when the moisture level is above 50%, the field doesn’t require water,
hence the pump will automatically switch off.
2.7
CONCLUSION:
This paper involves establishing a contemporary design technique of monitoring and
controlling the moisture level of soil using LabVIEW. Providing comprehensive tools that
need to build any measurement or control application in dramatically less time. The project
also includes rain sensor, which is very important in the project to avoid unnecessary power
wastage. No longer only are farmers able to generally use much less water to grow a crop,
they're able to increase growth yields and the satisfactory of the crop by using better
management of soil moisture at some point of vital plant growth degrees.
We can interface LCD screen in order to display the current status of the soil moisture
content levels, percentage of water utilized to water the plant, duration of time for which the
water pump is ON, etc. We can also show the graphical representation of the moisture
content levels in the soil. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the system, the
following recommendations can be put into consideration. Option of controlling the water
pump can be given to the farmer. The farmer may choose to stop the growth of crops or the
crops may get damaged due to adverse weather conditions.
 APPENDIX

The above diagram is graph representation of the soil moisture sensor. The
linearity in the soil moisture level (in %) and voltage output is represented
accordingly.
 REFERENCES

“Monitoring and Control of Relative Humidity in Soil using LabVIEW”, International

Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 9 Number 10 - Mar 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW#Interfacing_to_devices.

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/7588/en/\

“An Automated Control System: Using Lab VIEW, Android and Arduino” Somesh Katiyar,
et al. (2016), Research gate journal
“Smart irrigation system with three level access mechanisms” Muzammil Hussain, et al.
(2015), IEEE
“Using LabVIEW to Automate Commercial Irrigation” John D. Koontz, et al. (2014),
LABVIEW Journal
“Remote Sensing and Control of an Irrigation System Using a Distributed Wireless Sensor
Network” Yunseop (James) Kim, et al. (2008), IEEE
“Design of Remote Monitoring and Control System with Automatic Irrigation System using
GSM-Bluetooth” Purnima, et al. (2013), IJCA
Lab view based wireless soil moisture and temperature monitoring system for water irrigation
management v. D. Bachuwara1, a. D. Shligram, p. Prabhakarc and l. P. Deshmukhd
NI myDAQ user guide - NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS