Design and Implementation of Low Cost Automatic Irrigation System using Microcontroller

Abstract

We are living in an era where we are facing a shortage in our water supply and other resources, primarily due to the ever-increasing population. The ever-increasing need to feed all this population is daunting. So there is a need to achieve maximum efficiency in utilizing these resources. Water is an important natural resource. The availability of freshwater is decreasing rapidly, that it is often said that if there is a third world war, it’d be for water. Usually, when we do agriculture, the most commonly faced challenge is water scarcity. Also, much of the water is not utilized by plants if we do the usual form of irrigation. Advanced irrigation techniques like automatic irrigation are starting to gain popularity these days. But they all need human intervention to monitor the process, which is tedious for large systems. We introduce our automatic irrigation system as a solution to this. We introduce a microcontroller-based automatic system, which actively senses the soil’s moisture level, opens a valve when water moisture is below a threshold and stops when the cutoff level has reached. Thus water wastage is minimized. This sensor can monitor a single plant or an entire area. A farmer can easily monitor this system. Most of the fields of agriculture will benefit from the proposed system of automatic irrigation.

Keywords: Arduino UNO, Irrigation system, Low cost, Microcontroller, Soil moisture.

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