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Monitoring the soil parameters using IoT and Android based application for
smart agriculture

Conference Paper in AIP Conference Proceedings · July 2018

DOI: 10.1063/1.5047679

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Monitoring the soil parameters using IoT and Android based application for smart
agriculture
V. D. Bachuwar, A. D. Shligram, and L. P. Deshmukh

Citation: AIP Conference Proceedings 1989, 020003 (2018); doi: 10.1063/1.5047679

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5047679
View Table of Contents: http://aip.scitation.org/toc/apc/1989/1
Published by the American Institute of Physics

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 Monitoring the Soil Parameters using IoT and Android
Based Application for Smart Agriculture
V.D.Bachuwar1, A.D.Shligram2, L.P.Deshmukh1,*
1
Department of Electronic Science, School of Physical Sciences, Solapur University, Solapur-413255, M.S., India
2
Depatment of Electronic Science, Savitri Bai Phule Pune University, Pune- 411007 M.S., India.
*
laldeshmukh@gmail.com

Abstract
The present system is urbanized to collect a real-time data from the farm site such as light intensity, soil moisture, soil
temperature, humidity, etc. using the ADS1115 I2C protocol based on 16bit ADC and a water proof temperature sensor using
one wire protocol. The heart of the whole system is ESP8266-12E which enables the system to take away the sensor data
directly on Wi-Fi, and then again to Things Speak server and Android phone application. Using Things Speak server, the user
can record all the data of the sensor in excel format (24x7) and access any smartphone. A special Android application is also
developed that can run only authenticated user smartphone which offers the user-friendly GUI for monitoring the sensor data
and irrigation control.
Keywords: ESP8266-12E, I2C, ADS115, soil moisture, soil temperature, humidity, light intensity, Internet of Things (IoT),
Things Speak Server, Android Application.

INTRODUCTION
Intelligent schedule farming is an idea quickly gathering on in the agricultural industry. Proposing high-precision
crop control, useful data assembly, and computerized agriculture methods, there are evidently several advantages a
networked farm has to bid. The Internet, the invention of the century, has made revolution of bringing the world
people closer to each other than ever before. With the computing advancements in technologies, communication is
bringing the next generation Internet (IoT).As the population and urbanization increase, the larger cities have to be
transformed into smart cities for smart farming which can be achieved with the help of Internet of Things.
Addressing increasing water shortage, limited availability of lands and increasing costs at a very faster rate. While
meeting the increasing consumption, needs of a global population is expected to grow by 70% by 2050. Influence
of IoT on remotely monitored sensors that can detect soil moisture, crop growth and livestock feed levels, is to
manage and control their smartly connected harvesting and irrigation equipments. Currently, technical solutions for
monitoring, controlling and documenting agricultural farming processes, logistics, transportation, environments is
easily and effectively done by IoT supported devices [1–5].The smart farms built by manipulating the IoT
prototype represent foremost means to reach these goals. In a smart farm, the status of the crop and terrain are
always under control, many of the production actions can be actuated remotely by the farmer, sales can be
coordinated with the manufacture and the usage of capitals ties the actual needs, thus, the surplus is
circumvented[6].Smart devices or objects, capable of communication and computation, ranging from simple sensor
nodes to home appliances and sophisticated smartphones are present everywhere around us. The heterogeneous
network composing of such objects comes under the umbrella of a concept with a fast growing popularity, referred
to as IoT that IoT signifies an international network of exceptionally addressable interlocked objects[7]. According
to Gubbi et al., (2013), IoT is an "interconnection of sensing and actuating devices providing the ability to share
information across platforms through a unified framework, developing a common operating picture for enabling
innovative applications. This is realized by continuous universal detecting, statistics analytics and information
depiction with cloud computing as the amalgamating context. Therefore, the IoT wishes to advance one's ease and
productivity, by enabling cooperation among the smart objects[7,9]. The customary IoT typically involves various
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and numerous sensors installed on a specific location, the auxiliary sensor nodes
bring together data from site, collected data is stockpiled in a coordinator node, which interconnects Wi-Fi cloud
server over internet and manageable the sensor data on smart handset/ tablet/ laptop/ PC. To build the IoT based,
system generally the sensor node based on X-Bee will collect the information and at the coordinator side the GPRS
based GSM system (SIM900A) is used [10]. Such systems are bulky, consumes more power (nearly 1.5A) and
hence not suitable for remote applications. While the ESP8266 based coordinator node is small having much less
power sinking (nearly 120 mA). Danao et al. 2015 reported the wireless monitoring system for handling and
transportation of soybeans, using GPS and X-Bee series 1 [11], that range limited and user can face the
connections problem during long transportation routes. The solution is to implement the system with ESP8266 that

Emerging Technologies: Micro to Nano (ETMN-2017)

AIP Conf. Proc. 1989, 020003-1–020003-8; https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5047679
Published by AIP Publishing. 978-0-7354-1705-2/$30.00

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provides the real-time information of sensors, worldwide access is possible through a Wi-Fi to internet
connectivity via hotspot of the smartphone. Silveira et al. (2016) used the ESP8266 with the X-Bee network to
monitor the temperature[12]. In this paper, attention is focussed towards the hardware part (signal conditions,
calibration of sensors and interfacing with MCU), sensing technology (I2C and One wire), communication system
(Wi-Fi) and software applications (android application and cloud server).

THE HARDWARE SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE AND EXPERIMENTAL

PROCEDURE
A) The hardware system
The hardware system is a combination of ESP826612E Wi-Fi chipset, interfaced with ADC ADS1115 through a
I2C protocol, for pick up the data from light, soil moisture, humidity and temperature sensors through a one wire
protocol. Further the sensor data are uploaded on IoT server using inbuilt Wi-Fi as shown in Fig. 1(a) and actual
hardware is shown in fig.1 (b,c).

Fig.1(a) ESP826612E based Wi-Fi sensor node.

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Fig.1(b) IoT system with ESP826612E. Fig.1(c) IoT system with sensor connection arrangements

Fig.2 Development board of based WeMosD1 ESP826612E.

The Wi-Fi connection was made using the ESP826612E microcontroller (Espressif) which integrates a 32-bit RISC processor
and provides an IEEE 802.11 b/g/n stack with I2C, (SPI, one wire) and UART support. [14]. At this stage, ESP826612E based
WeMos D1development platform was used, which supports the AT as well as Arduino programming, (in this case, arduino IDE
is used for programming WeMos D1). Development bard of ESP8266 based WeMosD1 is shown in fig.2
Data from sensors is converted into digital form using ADC ADS1115, which provides 16 bit four single-ended or two
differential inputs with programmable gain amplifier (PGA), [15]. Its tiny size useful for portable instrumentation. The main
purpose of using ADS1115 is that, ESP826612E having only one 10 bit ADC channel with reference 3.3V. While there are
three sensors required (light, humidity and soil moisture) and ADS1115 is 16 bit 4 channel I2C ADC with high accuracy.

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ADS 1115 pin 9 (SDA) and pin 10 (SCL) is connected to pin D14 (SDA) and pin D15 (SCL) respectively of ESP826612E . The
ADS1115 chips have a base 7-bit I2C address of 0x48 (1001000) and a clever addressing scheme that allows four different
addresses using just one address pin (named ADR for Address). To programme the address the pin were connected as follows:
0x48 (1001000) ADR -> GND
0x49 (1001001) ADR -> VDD
0x4A (1001010) ADR -> SDA
0x4B (1001011) ADR -> SCL
Here, pin 1 (ADR) was used for I2C address generation and connected to GND.

B) EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE FOR SENSOR INTERFACING AND CALIBRATION

The three sensors [light intensity (LDR), soil moisture and humidity (SY-HS220)], were interfaced to channels CH0, CH1
and CH2 of ADS1115 respectively.
i) Light intensity sensor (LDR) calibration
Interacting of LDR to ADS1115 is shown in Fig. 3(a)

Fig.3(a) Interfacing of LDR to ADS1115. Fig.3(b) Graph of log (R) vs log (lux).

This line calculation comes from the plot of log (lux) as a function of log(R) with
Slope = -1.4049 and (1)
Y- Intercept = 7.0975 (2)
These coefficient calculations come from solving the above line calculation for lux.
(log (lux) = m*log(R) + b) (3)
A = 10^(y-intercept) (4)
B = slope (5)
lux = A * Resistance^B (6)

ii) SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR CALIBRATION

Interfacing of soil moisture sensor to ADS1115 shown in Fig.4

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 100

SOIL MOISTURE IN %
50
y = 20x
0 R² = 1
0 1 2 3 4 5
SENSOR OUTPUT, VOLTS

Soil Moisture in %
Linear (Soil Moisture in %)

Fig. 4(a) interfacing diagram of soil moisture sensor. Fig.4(b) Soil moisture sensor response.

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 voltage output 5V
for wet soil i.e. 100% moisture and 0V for dry soil i.e.0% moisture. Fig 4(b) shows the variation of generated voltage (by
sensors) as a function of the soil moisture. The output voltage is found to be directly proportional (linear) to the soil moisture. A
calibration factor which is a measure of the conversion of soil moisture in percentage is given by,
Soil moisture in % = (Vout / 5) * 100 (7)
Where,
Vout is the output voltage of a soil moisture sensor in Volts.
and 5 is the output voltage for 100% soil moisture.
The alternate equation for finding the soil moisture is;
Soil moisture in % (y) = 20 * output voltage of soil moisture sensor(x) (8)
iii) Humidity sensor calibration
The interfacing of humidity sensor to ADS1115 is shown in Fig.5(a) and humidity sensor response shown in
fig.5(b)[16].

% RH
100

80

60
%RH

40
y = 0.0216x + 20.077
Fig.5(a) Humidity sensor interfacing to ADS1115
20 R² = 0.924
0
0 1000 2000 3000 4000
Output in mV

Fig.5(b) Humidity sensor response

Humidity in %RH is given by : 0.0216 × Output voltage of HY-HS220 + 20.77 (9)

iv) DS18B20 AND ONE WIRE PROTOCOL

Interfacing of DS18B20 digital temperature sensor to WeMos D1 is shown in Fig.6 (a).The DS18B20 Digital Thermometer
(Dallas semiconductor) delivers 9 to 12-bit (configurable) temperature interpretations which stipulate the temperature of the
device. Information is sent to/from the DS18B20 over a 1-Wire interface so that only one wire (and ground) needs to be
connected from a central microprocessor to a DS18B20. Power for reading, writing, and performing temperature conversions
can be derived from the data line itself with no need for an external power source. Because each DS18B20 contains an unique

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silicon serial number, multiple DS18B20s can exist on the same 1-Wire bus[17]. Digital output of DS18B20 is connected to
digital pin D8 of WeMos D1 development board. The fig.4(b) shows the DS18B20 sensor response.

150 DS18B20
100

Tempature ⁰C
50 y = 0.0625x
R² = 1
0 Digital Out of DS18B20 in DEC
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Fig.6(a) interfacing of temperature sensor (DS18B20) Fig.6(b) DS18B20 sensor response
to WeMos D1
Temp = ((HighBytedata<<8)+LowBytedata)*slope of line(0.0625) (10)

C) THINGS SPEAK SERVER

ThingsSpeak is an open source Internet of Things (IoT) application and API to store and salvage information from things using
the HTTP protocol over the Internet or via a Local Area Network. ThingsSpeak empowers the design of instrument cataloguing
applications, location tracking applications, and a social network of things with prestige informs. ThingsSpeak key features
are: Effortlessly organize devices to send data to ThingsSpeak using standard IoT protocols. Envisage your sensor information
in real-time. Combined information on-demand from third-party sources. Run IoT analytics robotically based on timetables or
occasions. Model and build IoT systems without setting up servers or developing web software[18]. After creating an account
things speak server provides 8 channel server, one special API key and others unique channel ID for use
4. The flow of program :
We propose the following algorithm (fig.7).

Fig.8 a) IoT system with ESP826612E and sensors.

Fig.8 b) data uploaded on things speak server.

Fig.7 flow of program in ESP826612.

D) SYSTEM RESULTS
The prototype power consumption is 120 mA the radio communication and the monitoring of sensors parameter are the results
shown in fig 8a) and8b). The Figure9a), 9b), 9c) and 9d) present the graphics of the data about soil temperature, humidity, soil
moisture and light intensity. Data from the ESP sent to the Web platform ThingsSpeak.

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Fig.9a) field 1 of things speak server showing soil temperature data. Fig.9b) field 2 of things speak server showing humidity
data.

Fig.9c) field 3 of things speak server showing soil moisture data. Fig.9d) field 4 of things speak server showing light intensity
data.
E) CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents the development of a wireless sensor network based on the IEEE 802.15.4 pattern. The connection of the
wireless sensor network to the internet is made through an ESP826612E, via a Wi-Fi network (IEEE 802.11 pattern), which
grants a local access to monitor the soil temperature, humidity, soil moisture and light intensity from the farm site. The data also
could be send to an external Web platform and visualized in graphics. ESP826612E has connected to the internet over Wi-Fi
anywhere through hotspot with Wi-Fi protected access2 (WAP2) security. The things speak application can be run with a
wireless network of Wi-Fi an application was a veteran on a portable computer with a 2.40 GHz CPU, 4 GB DDR. The
application can easily open on the smart phone with android 4.4, 1.6GHz Quad-core processor with 1GB RAM, The developed
ESP826612E based DAQ system is successfully used for a specific application or can be modified easily for any application of
our interest and easy to scale up for sensor number. All acquired data can be easily stored in excel form and downloaded easily
from Things Speak Server.
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