Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Effective management of water resources is of key concern in cropping systems in semiarid and arid areas. Distributed sensor-based irrigation systems provide an efficient solution to support site-specific irrigation that allows farmers to maximize their crop growth along with saving water. This paper describes details of the design and instrumentation of a smart automated irrigation, that supports a wireless sensor network, a memory storage for storing the details of the crop and the soil type, and software for real-time sensing and control of a site-specific precision move irrigation system. Field conditions were site-specifically monitored by field sensor maintained in the smart irrigation device based on a soil property map, and periodically sampled and wirelessly transmitted to a base station. An embedded systems based, irrigation machine was converted to be electronically controlled by a programming logic controller that gets updates from a remote Global Positioning System (GPS) and wirelessly communicates with the GPS to get information with about the humidity level and the temperature. Communication signals from the sensor and the GPS system are sent to the irrigation controller are successfully interfaced using low-cost wireless radio communication. Graphic user interface-based software developed in this paper offered stable remote access to field conditions and real-time control and monitoring of the variable-irrigation rate.