Soil Control Grid: From The Ground To The Cloud

From the Ground to the Cloud

The new Arduino MkrFox1200 is able to connect to the Sigfox Network.

Sigfox is a network that works in an low bandwith range: Industrial, Scientific and Medical ISM radio band which uses 868MHz in Europe and 902MHz in the US

It needs very few energy to communicate.

The MkrFox1200 , can send to the Sigfox Network, 140 messages each day (downlink) and receive 4 messages (uplink) from the network.

Each message is limited to 12 bytes.

This network is ideal for a lot of IOT projects where:

• rate of messages each day is not important: an hourly summary of the data for each device is enough

• low energy consumption: in order to be placed and forget for months

A single mkrfox1200 can send messages for months with just a couple of AAA battery!

It works in open air, the device is shipped with an antenna: you have to place the antenna on a window in order to make the radio communication works.

To make the device works: you have to register the board to the network the device is ready to send/receive messages.

With other technologies like wifi, bluetooth, zigbee, you always need a gateway to route the received data to the cloud: this means that you need an app, to setup the device.

Once the data fly from the device to the Sigfox Network, the Sigfox backend is able to forward / delivery your data to an external service you define: azure, amazon or a custom solution (REST).

If you are planning to create a device for you, a custom solution is enough.

If you are planning to build a device to sell to thousand/milion of people, think big and use a cloud solution: amazon aws iot or azure iot hub.

Project

I decided to create a device to monitor the moisture of some plants in a "field", I called it "Plant1200"

The hypothetical idea is that you have a field with lot of plants and you want to monitor the soil of the plants in order to control the status of the irrigation.

This helps to make the plants healthy and and save some moneys.

My Plant1200 can control the status of 3 plants with 1 single SigFox1200 thanks to the 3 attached moisture sensor.

Attention: I used FC-28 Soil moisture sensor.

The moisture sensor is a sensor able to give information about the "humidity" of the moisture.

How can I build the project?

I created some videos that explain how to create the same project:

• First Configuration: connect the MkrFox to the Sigfox Network

• Arduino Code Explanation: how the schematics and code works

• Setup Amazon for Sigfox

• Display data on a Web Page

All videos in a playlist

Some photos:

Final Web Page

Thi show only one device monitoring the status of the plant: it is easy to tweak it in order to read data from more than one sigfox.