Environmental Parameters Monitoring And Control System In Horticulture Greenhouse Using The Internet Of Things: Case Of IPRC Musanze

Efficient management of greenhouse farming is a challenge to ensure high yield production. This is a great challenge to farmers who do not have a reliable mechanism to ensure the optimum environmental conditions for their crops. Farmers are opting to look for solutions from technologies such as Machine to Machine and Internet of Things. This paper proposes a wireless sensor network architecture for real-time greenhouse environmental parameters monitoring to achieve technology- based farming at a low management cost. Uncontrolled temperature, humidity, light intensity and soil moisture content, are among the major parameters that contribute to the deterioration of plants in the green house. The system employs the temperature and Humidity sensor DHT11, a light sensor LDR and soil moisture sensor to detect the environment parameters inside the greenhouse. A low-cost Wi-Fi microchip, with built -in TCP/IP networking software called as ESP8266, has been used to help connect the microntroller with the internet wirelessly. Sensed data is monitored on-site using a Liquid Crystal Display. The ThingSpeak Cloud platform has been used to assure the remote monitoring of the sensed data, and further analytics can be done through it. Actuators namely the solenoid valve, cooling fan, and heating bulb are immediately triggered in case the limit level of the environmental parameters been sensed, has been exceeded. The Global System for Mobile Communication has been used to provide notification to the farmers cell phone farmers in case of critical conditions. The results of the system are provided in form of waveforms observed through the ThingSpeak for the sensed parameters, others are in form of notification through LCD and GSM, and the actions performed by the solenoid valve, cooling fan and Heating bulb in case the sensed environment data goes beyond the required level