IOT Based Fertilizer System for Smart Agriculture

My country India has been badly affected by climate change due to heavy deforestation. So many campaigns arose planting more trees. However, to reduce my effort in gardening, I made something that watering and fertilizing my plants based on an Blynk app.

The plants often get neglected at holiday time and so this watering and feeding system was made and installed so that the plants were irrigated all the time.The mixing tank is filled with water through the solenoid valve. The peristaltic pumps dose the tank with the required amount of fertilizer and then the mixer pump is turned off. The mixture drains into the growing media under gravity

This is one of unique and best project which was never done by anyone before, so without wasting any time let’s Hop into build process of this project

Overview

In 2021, the estimated total population in India amounted to approximately 1.38 billion people.

India currently has the second-largest population in the world

and the population rate is increasing day-by-day; then after40 to 50 years there will be a serious problem for food's, so the development of agriculture is necessary.

As we know that soil is very important for agriculture system, Especially from soil moisture and nutrients are essential elements for plants and crops.

Therefore, soil moisture and nutrient monitoring are important in modern agriculture and horticulture, It can also be an interesting feature of a smart farming system using Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

This project presents an IoT application in the blynk platform

The purpose of this project is to monitor soil moisture , humidity-temp, and nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K) (NPK) values ​​for indoor plants.

Required Material for this project

• Node MCU aka ESP8266 Board
• BC 547
• TP 7805 Transistor
• Solenoid valve for flow control
• DC voltage Booster
• zero PCB
• Resistors
• Soldering station

All the electronics use 12V components, for safety as much as anything in an outside environment.

Temperature and Humidity

One of most used sensors for capturing weather data is the DHT11 (or it's brother DHT22), a digital relative humidity and temperature sensor. It uses a capacitive humidity sensor and a thermistor to measure the surrounding air, and spits out a digital signal on the data pin (no analog input pins needed).

Soil Moisture Humidity

The soil moisture sensor consists of two probes which are used to measure the volumetric content of water. The two probes allow the current to pass through the soil and then it gets the resistance value to measure the moisture value.

When there is more water, the soil will conduct more electricity which means that there will be less resistance. Therefore, the moisture level will be higher.

Dry soil conducts electricity poorly, so when there will be less water, then the soil will conduct less electricity which means that there will be more resistance. Therefore, the moisture level will be lower.

NodeMCU

ESP8266

The ESP8266 is a really useful, cheap WiFi module for controlling devices over the Internet. It can work with a micro-controller like the Arduino or it can be programmed to work on its own.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has just been made a whole lot cheaper and easier!

Solenoid valve

A solenoid is a device that converts electrical energy into mechanical energy. It has a coil wound over a conductive material, this set-up acts as an electromagnet. The advantage of an electromagnet over natural magnet is that it can be turned on or off when required by energizing the coil. Thus when the coil is energized then according to faradays law the current-carrying conductor has a magnetic field around it, since the conductor is a coil the magnetic field is strong enough to magnetize the material and create a linear motion.

Projects with Arduino or other microcontroller platforms where it is necessary to activate something through a solenoid.

Fertigation

Fertigation is a method of fertilizer application in which fertilizer is incorporated within the irrigation water by the drip system.

• In this system fertilizer solution is distributed evenly in irrigation. The availability of nutrients is very high therefore the efficiency is more.
• In this method liquid fertilizer as well as water soluble fertilizers are used.
• By this method, fertilizer use efficiency is increased from 80 to 90 per cent.

Fertigation is defined as the injection of fertilizers, soil amendments and other products typically needed by farmers into soil.

With an IoT-enabled fertigation solution, farmers could remotely control how many fertilizers are injected and within what volumes.

What Is Smart Farming ?

Smart farming or Smart Agriculture system is the term used to describe the adoption of modern information and communications technologies in order to enhance, monitor, automate or improve agricultural operations and processes.

the Sensors are collect all information such as soil moisture, fertilization, weather and transmit that through a gateway over cellular wireless network to a central hub providing farmers real time access to information and analysis on their land, crop, livestock, logistics and machinery.

Assemble the Supporting Frame

we use 1ft wood board for supporting frame

Drill hole in MDF board keeping in mind about distance between bottles as show above image

Attach the Bottle With Support Rod

To make stand support I will be piercing 3 support rod structures into our wooden board

I use Three plastic bottle as the mixing tank, aluminum won't work for this project so better prefer to use plastic bottle because plastic bottle are visible so I check the inside material

Fertilizing supply mechanism

• we use Three pcs syringes to make fertilizing supply mechanism
• To do this cut out syringes into half
• drill a hole in the rubber bush and
• inserted IV tube as show picture in below

I made Mini holders which was also 3D print to support this syringes

For fluid transfer I use three Solenoid valves which works similar to water pumps

Exact same Materials which are used is project might not be available in your area

so you can look for alternatives which can be found in and around your home

Basic Working Principle of Automated Fertilizer

Circuit & Diagram

Assemble Circuit on Zero PCB

As you can see, I have made these circuits on zero PCB by myself, if you do not want to make it then there is no problem, you can download the gerber file from here that you can order it from any PCB manufacturer.

but I highly recommend you to order from NextPCB

NextPCB is one of the famous PCB manufacturer in china

NextPCB offers you get free PCB assembly in 0 Dollars. PCB board manufacturer Nextpcb.com

Before finishing the final installation to check if everything works fine I made use of multimeter to check different terminals

Final Assemble

use your own ideology to connect this tube from plastic bottle to input 12 of DC power water pump Motors

I will be using aquarium pump for water supply

Now fill each of these 3 containers with

• nitrogen fertilizers
• Phosphorus fertilizers
• potassium fertilizers.

Introduce with Blynk

Blynk is a new platform that allows you to quickly build interfaces for controlling and monitoring your hardware projects from your iOS and Android device.

• Blynk is perfect for interfacing with simple projects like monitoring the temperature of your garden
• turning lights on and off remotely.

Personally, I’m using it to monitoring My Garden.

To run run a Blynk app together with your code, you will need :

Download BLYNK app for Apple Iphone or Android

Output

Three bottles of chemical are used to feed the plants.

A 2 liter bottle was used as the mixing tank.

The float switch fills the tank with about 2 liters of water and the submersible pump is used to mix everything.

Chemicals are pumped into the tank through the clear tubes.

Final

• Water flow can be increase or decrease just by rotation of Potentiometer in blynk apk
• Ability to what lies 20 to 25 plants at a time from this IOT nodemcu projects is possible
• Temperature humidity and moisture data will be share with your phone through blynk apk

KEY FEATURES OF THIS PROJECT

• You can control your device staying anywhere in the world through the Blynk apk in your phone
• As discussed at introduction, our final goal here is to take care of a plantation With the data provide by sensors.
• we will know the air and soil temperature, air relative humidity and the most important how "dry" is the soil.
• With those data in hand, our program should calculate if would be necessary to irrigate the plantation, turning on a water pump or to turn on an electric lamp to provide the appropriate heat to the crop. For that, we will use a small dual 5V Relay Module for Pump and Lamp activation.

Working Video