Abstract:
With the rapid growth in global population, agriculture becomes more important to meet the needs of the human race. Agriculture requires irrigation, and every year we have more water consumption than rainfall. At the present era, farmers use irrigation technique through the manual control in which they irrigate land at regular intervals. Beside the increase workload of this manual technique, it consumes more water or sometimes the water reaches late due to which the crops get dried.
The aim of this research is to develop an automatic irrigation system using microcontroller. The system uses several sensors output to monitor different soil conditions and compares them against a set of threshold values. Accordingly, it may run one or more actuator in order to maintain optimum soil condition. The system can also be run in manual mode regardless of the sensors signals. The system can be remotely controlled using dual tone multi frequency (DTMF) technique and connect from any phone to farms phone. The system has Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), so that it has the ability to dial a predefined number as an alert to inform about abnormal events for seeking human interventions. Before the hardwire implementation, a simulation for the proposed system is done with Proteus program, Then the proposed system had been implemented and a number of testing scenarios under different environment conditions had been carried. Both of simulation and the hardwired prototype results demonstrated a perfect operation of the system. The benefits of such system are of great significance if implemented in agriculture.
