Management of Unified Control and Automated System for Smart Hydroponics

Abstract

The formulated concept was to design and develop a system of automating and managing a hydroponics farm to address the problem encountered in traditional farming, which is too manual and labor-intensive. This problem was addressed by introducing an intelligent way of monitoring and controlling essential water parameters in growing lettuce in a Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) hydroponics. The concept was initiated by designing and developing a management system, developing the hardware and firmware components to control and monitor the NFT hydroponics using the “Internet of Things (IoT)”, and evaluating the performance and reliability of the developed system. The management system developed was embedded with the IoT for controlling and monitoring specific actuators for driving the DC and AC pumps, the chiller for desired water temperature, dosing, and fertigation pumps to maintain the pH and EC values for optimum plant growth. All these features were made possible using an open-source development board as the hardware and an Android application solely for the purpose, both components of the developed system that can automatically collect the enormous amount of data generated for the management of hydroponic systems, which is hardly achieved by manual testing as practiced. The management system not only provides sufficient data for decision-making but also eases the monitoring and control of essential water parameters that are critical in the growth of plants.