Payero, J.O. An Effective and Affordable Internet of Things (IoT) Scale System to Measure Crop Water Use. AgriEngineering2024, 6, 823-840.
Payero, J.O. An Effective and Affordable Internet of Things (IoT) Scale System to Measure Crop Water Use. AgriEngineering 2024, 6, 823-840.
Payero, J.O. An Effective and Affordable Internet of Things (IoT) Scale System to Measure Crop Water Use. AgriEngineering2024, 6, 823-840.
Payero, J.O. An Effective and Affordable Internet of Things (IoT) Scale System to Measure Crop Water Use. AgriEngineering 2024, 6, 823-840.
Abstract
Scales are widely used in many agricultural applications, ranging from weighing crops at harvest to determine crop yields to regularly weighing animals to determine growth rate. In agricultural research applications, there is a long history of measuring crop water use (evapotranspiration) using a particular type of scale called weighing lysimeters. Typically, weighing lysimeters require very accurate data logging systems that tend to be expensive. Recent developments in open-source technologies, such as micro-controllers and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, created opportunities for developing effective and affordable ways to monitor crop water use and transmit the data to the Internet in near real-time. Therefore, this study aimed to create an affordable Internet of Things (IoT) scale system to measure crop evapotranspiration. A scale system to monitor crop evapotranspiration was developed consisting of an Arduino-compatible microcontroller with cell phone communication, electronic load cells, an Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) multiplexer, and analog-to-digital converters (ADC). The system was powered by a LiPo battery, charged by a small (6 W) solar panel. The IoT scale system was programmed to collect data from the load cells at regular time intervals and send the data to the ThingSpeak.com IoT platform. The system performed successfully during indoor and outdoor experiments conducted in 2023 at the Clemson University Edisto Research and Education Center, Blackville, SC. The results from the experiments showed that the IoT scale system could accurately measure crop evapotranspiration using the weighing lysimeter technique.
Keywords
evapotranspiration; scale; water use; arduino; IoT
Subject
Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
