Description
In the field of agriculture, use of proper method of irrigation is important because the main reason is the lack of rains & scarcity of land reservoir water. The continuous extraction of water from earth is reducing the water level due to which lot of land is coming slowly in the zones of un-irrigated land.
Another very important reason of this is due to unplanned use of water due to which a significant amount of water goes waste. For this purpose; we use this automatic plant irrigation system. The system derives power from?solar energy through photo-voltaic cells. Hence, dependency on erratic commercial power is not required.
In this project we use solar energy which is used to operate the irrigation pump. The circuit comprises of sensor parts built using op-amp IC. Op-amp?s are configured here as a comparator. Two stiff copper wires are inserted in the soil to sense whether the soil is wet or dry.
A microcontroller is used to control the whole system by monitoring the sensors and when sensors sense dry condition of soil, then the microcontroller will send command to relay driver IC the contacts of which are used to switch on the motor and it will switch off the motor when the soil is in wet condition.
The microcontroller does the above job as it receives the signal from the sensors through the output of the comparator, and these signals operate under the control of software which is stored in ROM of the microcontroller. The condition of the pump i.e., ON/OFF is displayed on a 16X2 LCD which is interfaced to the microcontroller.
Further the project can be enhanced by interfacing it with a GSM modem to gain control over the switching operation of the motor.
Hardware Requirements
- Arduino Microcontroller
- Op-Amp
- LCD
- Solar Panel
- MOSFET
- Relay
- Motor
- Voltage Regulator
- Diodes
- Capacitors
- Resistors
- LED
- Crystal
- Transistors
Software Requirements
- Arduino IDE
- Languages: Embedded C