A Simple Platform for Emulating Irrigation Scenarios and its Applicability for Big Data Collection toward Water Preservation via in-Situ Experiments

Agriculture has to be drastically assisted by the new promising technological advancements to alleviate the extremes in water demand and/or water waste. In this regard, this work showcases how soil moisture instruments can be combined with low-end microcontrollers, energy efficient communication protocols, single board computers, flow and pressure sensors, and in-purpose actuators to form a synergistic platform able to generate and study a diverse set of realistic irrigation scenarios, thus paving the way for the creation of intelligent models intercepting water misuse events and/or irrigation failures. Two drip irrigation points were setup, each having a TEROS 12 and a TEROS 10 instrument placed at different depths, while a prototype water flow/pressure control and report system was developed. All modules were sending data in real-time, via LoRa, to a central node implemented using a Raspberry Pi, for further processing and for making them widely available via common network infrastructures, also provisioning for remote scenario invocation. The exact steps being necessary, for the specific hardware and software components to be combined into a functioning whole, are clearly explained, thus allowing other teams of researchers and/or university educators worldwide to be inspired and benefited from platform replication.