Abstract

MONROY-GARCIA, Oscar Yesid; ROLON-QUINTERO, Daniel Camilo  and  SEPULVEDA-MORA, Sergio Basilio. Low-cost modular wireless system for monitoring environmental variables in greenhouses: A support to the small-scale farmer. Rev. Cient. [online]. 2017, n.29, pp.164-179. ISSN 0124-2253.  https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.rc.2016.29.a5.

Farmers in Norte de Santander department supervise the microclimate in greenhouses by an intuitive estimation based on their long time experience. This method is inadequate and subjective, and it has a negative impact on the development and performance of the crops; limiting the quality and production. Therefore, this agricultural procedure requires the development and implementation of efficient technology aiming to the improvement of the production. For small-scale farmers is difficult to acquire supervision systems due to their low income and the relative high cost of this kind of technology; then, farmers prefer to prescind from the advantages of using monitoring systems in greenhouses. This paper presents the design and development of a low-cost modular system that allows the supervision of environmental variables within a greenhouse. The proposed system uses ZigBee protocol and a Wireless Sensor Network to collect data of humidity, temperature and luminosity; these variables are stored in a database and the system shows a real time plot and allows to generate reports. The Packet Reception Rate obtained in the experimental setup was between 70% and 100%. Besides, the proposed system has a reduction in cost of about 87% with respect to commercial systems with similar features.

Keywords : Agriculture; packet reception rate; supervision; Wireless Sensor Network; XBee ZB; ZigBee.

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