Microcontroller based drip irrigation system.pdf

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Microcontroller Based Automatic Drip
Irrigation System
Fahimuddin Khan
Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University
E-Mail: yourfahim46@gmail.com
Keywords Soil moisture sensor Temperature sensor PIC microcontroller
Solenoid valve
1 Introduction
Water is the resource that all living species need like human beings, animals, plants,
etc. Due to the excessive and continuous extraction of water from earth via wells or
bore wells is responsible for the reduction of the water level which leads to making
a lot of land in the zones of un-irrigated land. Hence proper planning of water usage
is needed. There is an immense demand for new techniques of water saving in
irrigation systems. The lack of rain water and scarcity of land water also results in
the decrement a volume of water on earth. In the drip irrigation technique,the water
is provided to the root zone of plants using drip due to which a large amount of
water can be saved. Figure 1 shows typical drip irrigation system. At
Present, the farmers have been irrigating the land manually in which the farmers
must irrigate the lands at every regular interval. This technique may consume extra
water. Sometimes to avoid drying of crops, water is provided to roots of the plants.
Because of this growth rate becomes slow, the weight of fruits becomes lighter, etc.
Automatic drip irrigation system can solve this issue entirely. Today the availability
of carrying agricultural activity is less; therefore automation in agriculture is nee-
ded. Proposed irrigation system uses valves to turn ON or OFF automatically. Drip
irrigation can be applied to a wide range of field conditions. The simple Drip
irrigation assembly is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Drip irrigation assembly [6]
Components
The components of Microcontroller Based Automatic Drip Irrigation System are as
follows [5, 6]:
1. Water Pump
2. Water Filter
3. Solenoid Valve
4. Drip lines with Emitters
5. Soil Moisture and Temperature Sensors
6. PIC Microcontroller Unit
7. GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication).
2 Irrigation
The artificial process of providing water to the soil for growing crops is called as
irrigation. Water is undeniable or major resource for living organisms. Agriculture
is one of the ﬁelds where water is required in very large quantity. Nowadays,
insufﬁciency of water is becoming one of the biggest problems in the world. Hence
to overcome this issue, microcontroller based automatic drip irrigation system is
presented.

Types of Irrigation
There are mainly three types of irrigation and can be explained as follows.
1. Surface Irrigation
2. Drip Irrigation
3. Sprinkler Irrigation
1. Surface irrigation
It is also called as conventional irrigation. Surface irrigation is the irrigation
technique in which water is applied and distributed over the surface by gravity.
A surface type irrigation system can wet the lower leaves of the plants. When
land is irrigated by using such methods, the soil surface is saturated and stays
wet for a long time. These conditions lead to infection the plants. The surface
irrigation methods consume a large amount of water. The drip or trickle
irrigation is used to solve this problem.
2. Drip irrigation
It is also known as micro-irrigation or localized irrigation system, is irrigation
method which can save water by allowing it slowly drip at the plant’s roots,
either onto the soil surface or directly onto the root zone. It consists a network of
valves, pipes, tubing, and emitter. Drip irrigation implemented at plant’s root
zone is shown in Fig. 1.
3. Sprinkler irrigation
The irrigation system based on overhead sprinklers in this system, spray guns,
installed permanently on a riser. Water pressure based using guns can also be
used to avoid implementation ambiguity.
3 Methodology
There are mainly three methods used for Automation:
(a) Time-based system
The basic aim is to prepare system schedule according to water requirements of
the crop. Here time is the basis for operation.
(b) Volume-based system
In this type of system, a land is divided into the small part called a ﬁeld or
section, and every section or ﬁeld will receive the pre-allocated volume of
water.
(c) Sensor (priority)-based system
In this system, sensors give feedback to the controller, depending on which the
controller initiates various actions as required.
In this paper, the methods mentioned above (Time based, Volume based and
Priority based) are combined in one system.

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4 System Architecture
The block diagram of microcontroller based automatic drip irrigation system is as
shown in Fig. 2 which consists of various blocks. The function of each block is
explained as follows:
(A) Sensors: A sensor is an object or device whose purpose is to transduce events
or changes in its environment regarding physical quantity, and then provide
relative output.
(a) Temperature sensor: A temperature sensor is a device which provides for
temperature measurement through an electrical signal. The LM35 5 V
sensor is used to measure the temperature. The LM35 series are precision
integrated sensors. The output voltage is linearly proportional to the
Centigrade temperature.
(b) Soil moisture sensor: Soil moisture sensors measure the volumetric water
content in soil. Measuring soil moisture is useful for farming applications
to help farmers manage their irrigation systems more efﬁciently. Sensors
should be buried properly in the root zone of the plants to be irrigated.
(B) Liquid crystal display (LCD): The LCD shows a matrix of the alphabets,
numbers, characters and symbols on the LCD screen. The LCD used in this
system is the eight-bit parallel type, and the display size is 16 * 2. It is used
for displaying the temperature and moisture value on a display screen.
(C) Solenoid valve: A fluid solenoid valve operates on electromechanical
principle. It converts the input electrical energy into mechanical energy. This
willinternally open and closes the switch automatically. In the case of a valve
withtwo-port the flow is switched on or off; whereas in a three-port valve,
switching of outflow is done between the two outlet ports.
Fig. 2 System block diagram

(D) GSM: GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), developed by the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to explain the
protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks used by GSM
modems. There will be serial communication between microcontroller and
GSM. So the information from the microcontroller can be sent as SMS
through GSM.
(E) PIC microcontroller: PIC stands for Peripheral Interface Controller is a
family of modiﬁed Harvard architecture microcontrollers registered trademark
of Microchip Technology. In this project, PIC 16F877A microcontroller is
used. The important features of PIC 16F877 series are listed below.
Features of PIC 16F877A:
1. High performance
2. RISC family CPU.
3. Only 35 instructions.
4. Single cycle instructions, only for branches of program two cycles instructions
are required.
5. Interrupts available are fourteen.
6. Different types of addressing modes (direct, Indirect, relative addressing modes).
7. Power on Reset (POR).
(F) Power supply: A power supply is to be developed for desired load conditions.
Power supply unit converts input AC power to DC power required by various
parts of the project such as 5–12 V in our system.
5 Results and Discussions
The output of LM35 is in the form of the analog temperature sensor as its output is
analog and requires to be converted into digital. The input supply voltage is 5 V.
The output will be in the form of voltage (Table 1).
The sensor used for soil moisture measuring is directly connected to the
microcontroller. The output is in the digital form and data is sent directly to PIC
microcontroller. The output of microcontroller is displayed on LCD screen
(Table 2).
Table 1 Output of LM 35
temperature sensors
Temp (°C) Output voltage in mV
30 300
31 310
32 320
33 330
34 340

114
Table 2 Output of soil
moisture sensor
Fig. 3 Irrigation system
Fig. 4 Output screen 1
When moisture level of soil is low, the solenoid valve is turned ON
automatically. When the desired level of water is reached in the soil the valve will
be closedautomatically (Fig. 3).
Figure 4 shows output screen 1. First, the appropriate system is selected (time-
based, priority based and volume based system) for irrigation. If time-based
system is selected then, the results are as follows. In time-based system, a
significant amount of water is available to irrigate land depending upon crop
condition (Table 3).
Moisture level (%) Output voltage (V)
20 2.75
40 2.10
60 1.39
80 0.71

Table 3 Observation table of time based system
Starting delay in seconds Motor status Motor status (end of delay)
10 On (for 10 s) Off
Table 4 Observation table of
priority based control system
If the priority based system is selected then, the following results are observed
which are as shown in Table 4. Priority is assigned depending upon the dry
condition of the ﬁeld .
6 Conclusion
This paper mainly focuses on designing a fully automated drip irrigation system.
The microcontroller based automatic drip irrigation system is implemented and
found to be feasible and cost effective. It will be advantageous over manual control
as it uses a mechanism like time-based control mechanism, volume based control
mechanism, and sensor based control mechanism.
System Dry (%) Priority
1 50 2
2 90 1
3 30 3

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