Solar powered Irrigation System

Published on 20 May 2022. Written by Tej Kumar

One of the biggest networks where people work as groups in the field of Agriculture. As technology is increasing and automation is replacing manual operation in almost all the fields, the same can be applied to the Agricultural Field also. Previously farmers manually used to water the fields whenever needed and power for providing the water is taken from household power. The cons of this system are we need to pay for the power and every time human intervention is needed whenever water needs to be provided. Imagine there is an automatic system where whenever water is needed for the field, automatically pump will be turned on and when water level sufficient, the pump will be turned off automatically and the power required for the operation of the pump will be taken from the solar power.

You will need Arduino to interface the microcontroller with the Soil moisture sensor, Wi-Fi module, pump and solar panel. You will programme the microcontroller in such a way that whenever the soil moisture senses the moisture content less than a certain value, the pump will be automatically turned on and then as soon as the soil moisture sense the moisture content more than a particular value, the pump will be turned off automatically. Now the power taken by the pump to supply water will be taken from the Solar Panel itself. You can innovate the system to upload the data regarding pump status and moisture content status into a remote server for further analysis.

Project Description:

Arduino Uno: Arduino Uno: The digital and analog input/output pins equipped in this board can be interfaced to various expansion boards and other circuits. Serial communication interface is a feature in this board, including USB which will be used to load the programs from computer.
Wi-Fi Module: ESP8266 Wi-Fi module is generally used to establish the wireless communication between the devices. But this module is not capable of 5-3V logic shifting and will require an external logic level converter
Soil Moisture Sensor: The soil moisture sensor is a sensor designed to measure the moisture content present in the soil.
Water Pump: Generally a water pump pumps water from one place to other place using centrifugal force.
Solar Panel: The devices which converts the solar energy into electric energy is called Solar Panel.
Motor Driver: Generally the Arduino board is not capable of providing required amount of current for running the motors. So we use a device called Motor Driver which will provide sufficient current for driving the motors.

Project Implementation:

Interface the soil moisture, Wi-Fi module Solar Panel and water pump with Arduino
Power the components and upload the code
As soon as the soil moisture sensors detects less moisture content in the soil, the motor starts running immediately
As soon as the moisture content reaches sufficiently high, the motor stops pumping the water
The power required for the operation is taken from Solar Panel
All the data regarding Pump Status, Moisture content can be updated into the remote server for analysis

Software requirements:

Arduino IDE : You will be needing Arduino IDE software to write and upload the programming logic onto the Arduino Uno board
Thingspeak : Also, you need to create an account in the ThinkSpeak IoT platform to integrate the system onto the cloud and store the data online

Programming language: Arduino Programming (C++)

Kit required to develop Solar powered Irrigation System:

Technologies you will learn by working on Solar powered Irrigation System:

Solar powered Irrigation System

Project Description:

Project Implementation:

Software requirements:

Any Questions?

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