The Development of Automated Gardening System In-house
Living Apartment (DAGSILA)
Kamarul Izhar Bin Kamarudin
School of Mechanical Engineering.
University Technology Malaysia
kamarul_ik@yahoo.com
Abstract
The primary issue of DAGSILA is to
manage the consistency to ensure the system is
running smoothly without direct human
involvement. The systems have to be control the
water irrigation and humidity around the plant.
The solution to these problems is by designing
an automatic controlled system. Two sensors
are used in this project. Soil moisture sensor
needed to automatically control the valve of
watering system. Soil moisture sensor is set to
be at certain value. When the value is reaching
that value, valve will be irrigate the water into
the plant. As for humidity sensor, it will
measure the condition of the plant. Once the
humidity sensor detect that the environment
humidity percentage is lower than the
predetermined humidity value, the water mist
will be in the on state and vice versa.
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, many adult people live in the
stress condition. This is the common disease
happened to many working people that live in
the stressful environment. Important for all the
working people release their stress periodically.
Some people will go to pool, yoga, gym and
others activities that suits for them. On the other
hand, some people like to fill the free time doing
their hobby to release mind with the entire
problem from previous activities they have
momentarily.
Gardening is one of the popular hobbies
among people including all gender, adult and
children. They have the sense to archive when
they see their plant growth periodically. Put in a
simple way, when a person come back from
work and smells the aroma produced by the
plants inside their house, immediately they will
feel the sense of freshness thus it will release
their stressful mind.
Currently, the price of an estate house is
getting higher and higher. So many people are
now living in an apartment or house which has
no free space for gardening. As a result, small
scale green house is now the hottest trend in the
century. They do not need a large space, and
need not have a yard to plant. All it requires is a
small space indoor or outdoor; the rest is all
taken care by the system.
This project application based on the
electronic circuit that applied at the garden which
has functional automatically and manually.
Development of Automated Gardening System
In-house Living Apartment is a model or a
prototype for a real project on a large scale. In
this prototype, there are four systems that will
combine to each other’s to make a perfect
combination system.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Soil Moisture
Soil moisture sensors is to measure water
volume content in the soil. Since the direct
measurement of free-soil moisture requires
removing, drying, and weighting of a sample,
soil moisture sensors measure the water volume
content by using some properties of soils. It
measure electric resistance, dielectric constant,
or neutrons intersection as the moisture content
proxy. The relation between the measured
property and soil moisture is varies because it
depend on environment factor such as
temperature, type of soils or electric
conductivity. Reflected microwave radiation is
affected by the soil moisture and is used for
remote sensing in hydrology and agriculture.
Portable probe instruments can be used by
farmers or gardeners.
Table 1: Variation in soil water for different types of soil
Temperature Sensor
A temperature sensor plays an important
role in many applications. For example,
maintaining a specific temperature is essential
for equipment used to fabricate medical drugs,
heat liquids, or environment control. For
applications like these, the responsiveness and
accuracy of the detection circuit can be critical
for quality control.
However, temperature detection is part of
preventative reliability. For example, while an
appliance might not actually perform any high
temperature activities, the system itself could be
at risk to overheating. This risk arises from
specific external factors such as a harsh
operating environment or internal factors like
self-heating of electronics. By detecting when
overheating occurs, the system can take
preventative action. In these cases, the
temperature detection circuit must be reliable
over the expected operating temperature range
for the application. There is a several type of
sensor that suit the DAGSILA which is will be
discussed.
METHODOLOGY
This section will briefly be discussed on the
methodology implemented in the DAGSILA.
The first thing is to develop a gardenware and its
requirements on it and followed by hardware
setup. This section will discuss in detail on what
is the hardware requirements require to develop
DAGSILA. After the hardware is justified,
software is the things that will make this system
running smoothly and this project will be using
Arduino as the programming method.
After that, the gardenware, hardware and
software will be integrated. This project will start
to seed the tomato cherry into the gardenware
system and initiate the plant growing by monitor
the soil moisture, temperature and humidity of
the environment.
Figure 1: Methodology flow chart of research
Overall System
The DAGSILA system is divided into a
few systems. The first system is to control the
sprinkle water where is to release the sprinkle
water in automatic condition. It also to ensure the
plant at that garden is in good condition. When
the soil moister sensor probe detects the soil in
dry condition, then the sprinkler will
automatically ON. When the soil moister sensor
probe detects the soil is in wet condition, then
the sprinkler is OFF.
The second system is to control the plant
humidity in automatic condition. Most of the
plant require certain humidity for it to growth.
This system included temperature and humidity
sensor which is to detect dry humidity. When
humidity sensor sense dry, the motor will supply
water moist automatically. When the humidity
sensor sense wet, the motor will stop supply the
moist.
The DAGSILA is implemented in house
environment which is in small garden is inside
the house where there is no ultraviolet (UV) is
supply to the plant. Therefore, UV lighting need
to be established for the third system. The
DAGSILA will provides UV light based on the
plant requirements which is program to ON and
OFF with require time.
Figure 2: Overall system overview
Figure 3: Actual system overview

Table 2: Humidity condition
Table 3: Soil moisture condition
Flow chart of the DAGSILA program in
Arduino Uno microcontroller.
Figure 4: Flowchart of the program
RESULT AND DISCUSSION
After the DAGSILA has been developed,
then the data is taken in daily basic at morning
and night only while same data is collected on
the weekend.
Monitoring of the output data is started
from 5th November 2018 to 10th December 2018.
Data taken is at around 6:30am in the morning
and another data is at around 8:00pm in the
evening for every day to monitor the consistency
of the system. While for the hourly data taken is
on 17th November 2018 from 6:30am to 10:30pm
to monitor system working
Figure 5: Temperature Monitoring
As shown figure 5, the lower temperature
value is 23°C while for the highest temperature
value is 29°C, and average temperature for
morning condition is around 25°C. As per
literature review, the required temperature for
growing Tomato Cherry is around 18°C to 30°C.
It means the measured temperature at morning
condition is acceptable for the plant to growth.
Figure 6: Humidity Monitoring
The figure 6, the lower value is 82% which
is the limit of dry condition and 90% for the wet
condition. The humidity requirements of Tomato
Cherry to growth is around 65% to 90%. The
result obtained shows that it meets the
requirement and it is a good condition for the
plant to growth in-house area.
Figure 7: Soil Moisture Monitoring
Soil moisture is most important
measurement to ensure the plant receive enough
water. The system is working to supply water to
the soil if the soil moisture value is higher or
equal to 750 means that the soil is dry. Based
from the graph for morning monitoring, the
system able to control the water level in soil
which is the data shows soil moisture is in the
range between 350 to 700.
Figure 5: Temperature Monitoring

Figure 8: Hourly Soil Moisture Monitoring
As shown in the graph above, at 6:30am the
soil moisture reading is at 529 and consistently
increased to the value of 725 at 1:30pm. Hour
later the reading is significantly decreased to
308.This happen due to the program are set to
watering the plant when the soil moisture value
is greater than 750. So, between 1:30pm to
2:30pm, motor pump is ON to provide the water
to pump.
DISCUSSION
From the result obtained, it shows that the
system is able to control soil moisture to ensure
that the plant is receiving enough water. For the
temperature and humidity, it noticed that from
the Figure 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.7, and 4.8, all the
reading is in acceptable ranges for growth the
tomato cherry. It can be concluded that for
temperature and humidity is in good condition to
plant tomato cherry.
In term of plant growing from date 5th
November 2018, the plant is show slow growing.
Generally, the life cycle of a tomato plant may
be divided into three stages of growth. First is
the leaf supposing growth to six to ten inch in 20
days. Second stage is the plant is flowering in
forty-five days before it's fruitful for last stage
and can be harvest between sixty-five to eighty
day. But until 10th December 2018 which is
thirty-seven days, the growing is maintained at
four inches. This is because cherry tomato
requires nitrogen from the soil and too much
nitrogen from soil will slowing the growing of
the plant. This project is using compose soil and
it contain a lot of nitrogen. The second thing that
resulted the slowing of cherry tomato growth is
because of pest infected and this project is not
concentrate on the pest control activity.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
POSSIBILITIES
The project is successfully developed
which is meets the objectives to allow people
who live in the apartments to growth their own
plant. The program has performed well since
start in 5th November 2018 and it is continuing
to be monitored.
Eventually there are to be a lot demand and
challenge, there are few possibilities to improve
like develop connection for plants with internet
of things. Furthermore, by adding sensor is also
another idea for an experimental venture, there
are other project to be challenge such as
implementing solar power supply, air-
conditioning for plant that require lower
temperature etc.
However, in my own perspective of the
way to construct this, there is no doubt that this
system is working to help solved many human
manuver problem, from the human that life in the
apartment that is no grounding access to the
landed living house. By means of this project,
the system able to control the amount of water
released from water tank to soil for watering the
plant. Although the system is very helpful for
humanity, agriculture, and botanist that are the
people who could have benefit in using this
system.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Praised be to Allah SWT, finally I manage to
complete this thesis with entitled The Development
of Automated Gardening System In-house Living
Apartment.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to my
supervisor, Dr. Shaharil Bin Mad Saad for her
patience, guidance and advice throughout the year,
which proved valuable for the success of this thesis.
Also, I would like to thank my family,
especially to my mother, Hjh. Che Nah@Hasnah
Binti Keton and my wife, Madam Nur Afida Binti
Saifudin for their support and encouragement and
financial support through all this year.
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*Corresponding author: shaharil@utm.my