Efficient Automatic Plant Irrigation System Using ATMEGA Microcontroller

Mr.
Sundar Ganesh C S 49
Efficient Automatic Plant Irrigation System using

ATMEGA Microcontroller
Mr.Sundar Ganesh C S
Abstract: In this paper an automatic plant irrigation .

system using ATMEGA microcontroller is discussed.
Irrigation is the main part of agriculture. Labor-saving
and water-saving technology is a key issue in irrigation.
Microcontroller based automatic plant irrigation system
allows a simple and low cost method for irrigating the
crops automatically.
I. INTRODUCTION
Irrigation is the most important cultural practice and
most labour intensive task in daily agriculture sector.
Knowing when and how much to water are two important
aspects of irrigation. To do this automatically, sensors and
methods are available to determine when plants may need
water.
The main objective of this paper is to develop a
microcontroller based system to irrigate the plant
automatically. This system also supports water management
decision, which determines the controlling time for the
process. Another objective of the project is to send a short
message service(SMS) to farmer regarding motor ON and Fig.1 Block Diagram
OFF condition.
II. BLOCK DIAGRAM Liquid crystal display model is used to indicate the
Block diagram shows the various components is output of ADC in decimal, present date, month, year, hour,
shown in Fig.1. Moisture Sensor are copper clad of certain minutes, seconds and the state of relay whether MOTOR ON
length, thickness and separated from each other at a fixed or MOTOR OFF. SIM300 modem is used to connect to a
distance[1]. These sensors are used to measure the moisture GSM network and send text messages regarding on/off status
content of soil in terms of voltage and then given to of motor to farmer’s mobile.
Operational Amplifier.
The Op-Amp used in this project used in non III. SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR
inverting mode obtained the voltage from sensor is amplified, Soil moisture sensor is used to detect the moisture content
since they are of very low voltage and then given to Analog to of the soil. Moisture sensor circuit gives a high voltage when
Digital converter.The analog parameters measured by the it is dry and a low voltage when the soil is wet. The voltage
sensors are then converted to corresponding digital values by obtained from sensor is fed to the OP-AMP
the ADC.
[2]The microcontroller is the heart of the
proposed embedded system. It constantly monitors
the digitized parameters of sensor and verifies them with the
predefined threshold values and checks the condition for dry
and wet, and correspondingly the relay is made ON or OFF.
Another purpose of the microcontroller is to check whether
the real-time clock is equal to the ON/OFF time stored
previously in EEPROM by the user and for user interface
also, when the required condition is met, relay is made
ON/OFF.
Mr. Sundar Ganesh C S working as Assistant Professor in PSG College of

Technology, Coimbatore, India css@eee.psgtech.ac.in
Fig.2 Moisture Sensor
International Journal of Emerging Trends in Electrical and Electronics (IJETEE – ISSN: 2320-9569) Vol. 7, Issue. 1, Sep-2013.
Mr. Sundar Ganesh C S 50
The circuit designed uses a 5 V supply and a copper clad as V.REAL TIME CLOCK
sensor. It gives a voltage output corresponding to the
The DS1307 serial real-time clock (RTC) is a
conductivity of the soil. The conductivity of soil depends
low-power, full binary-coded decimal (BCD) clock/calendar
upon the amount of moisture present in it. It increases with
plus 56 bytes of NV-SRAM. The clock/calendar provides
increase in the water content of the soil. Fig.2 shows the
seconds, minutes, hours, day, date, month, and year
sensor circuit used in this work[3].
information. The DS1307 has a built-in power-sense circuit
The copper clad acts as the sensor. It is immersed
that detects power failures and automatically switches to the
into the soil, whose moisture content is under test. The soil is
backup supply.
examined under two conditions, namely dry and wet
The DS1307 is a low-power clock/calendar with 56
condition.
bytes of battery-backed SRAM. The clock/calendar provides
Under dry condition, the probes are placed in the soil
seconds, minutes, hours, day, date, month, and year
under dry conditions and are inserted up to a fair depth of the
information. The date at the end of the month is automatically
soil. As there is no conduction path between the copper clad,
adjusted for months with fewer than 31 days, including
the sensor circuit remains open. Under excess water condition
corrections for leap year. The DS1307 operates as a slave
the conductivity of the soil increases drastically and a steady
device on the I2C bus. Access is obtained by implementing a
conduction path is established.
START condition and providing a device identification code
followed by a register address. Subsequent registers can be
IV.ANALOG TO DIGITAL CONVERTER
accessed sequentially until a STOP condition is executed.
MCP3208 devices are successive approximation
12-bit ADC with on-board sample and hold circuitry. The
MCP3204/3208 devices operate over a broad voltage range
(2.7 V - 5.5 V). Low current design permits operation with
typical standby and active currents of only 500 nA and 320
μA, respectively.Fig.3 shows the functional block diagram of
MCP3208 ADC.
. Fig.4 Connection Diagram of Real Time Clock
When Vcc falls below 1.25 times VBAT, the device

terminates an access in progress and resets the device address
counter. Inputs to the device will not be recognized at this
time to prevent erroneous data from being written to the
device from an out-of-tolerance system. When Vcc falls below
VBAT, the device switches into a low-current battery-backup
mode. Upon power-up, the device switches from battery to
Vcc when Vcc is greater than VBAT +0.2 V and recognizes
inputs when Vcc is greater than 1.25 x VBAT.
Fig.3 Functional Block Diagram of MCP3208 ADC VI.MODEM

It is a compact and portable 60 pin terminal and can
The MCP3208 A/D converters employ a
be connected to a computer with the help of a standard RS232
conventional SAR architecture. With this architecture, a
serial port. SIM300 is a class of wireless MODEM devices
sample is acquired on an internal sample/hold capacitor for
that are designed for communication of a computer with the
1.5 clock cycles starting on the fourth rising edge of the serial
GSM and GPRS network. It requires a SIM (Subscriber
clock after the start bit has been received.
Identity Module) card just like mobile phones to activate
communication with the network. The SIM300 is integrated

with the TCP/IP protocol. Extended AT commands are SOIL SENSOR OP-AMP RELAY
developed which is very useful for those data transfer CONDITION OUTPUT OUTPUT STATUS
applications.
Dry 2.85 V 4.72 V ON
Wet 29.5 mV 33.4 mV OFF
VII.CONCLUSION
Efficient irrigation management is a major concern

in many planting systems. In this project, we presented
technology which allowed farmers to maximize their
productivity while saving labour. This report shows in detail,
the design of the hardware architecture, the software
algorithm applied for the field irrigation system. The
Fig.5 Interface between modem and microcontroller performance of the whole system proved its high reliability.
Efficient scheduling of irrigation gives the highest return for
Since AT commands are the interface between GSM the least amount of water.
modem and controller, these commands can be sent to the Potential applications of this system can be extended
GSM modem by the microcontroller itself. In this case, the to environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, and
receive (Rx) and transmit (Tx) pin of the GSM module are facility automation by little modifications. The value of this
connected to the transmit and receive pin of AT89S52’s technology can be best realized when integrated with
serial port, respectively. The controller is programmed to agronomic knowledge, using the information gathered in the
send a fixed command ‘AT’ to the module. So this involves improvement of decision support systems. Also, improving
serial data communication. Fig. 3.27 shows the interfacing operations by providing early warning of equipment failure
of microcontroller with GSM modem along with flow of AT and a predictive maintenance tool, improving energy
commands, information response and result codes. management, providing automatic record-keeping for
regulatory compliance, eliminating personnel training costs
VI.RESULTS or reducing insurance costs.
People can also link several such star irrigation networks
When the soil is dry, the sensor output voltage is through adding wireless routers to achieve large-scale remote
about 2.85 V which is the input to op-amp. The voltage is irrigation application.
amplified in the op-amp and the output of 4.72 V is given to
microcontroller. This voltage is enough to drive and turn on VIII.FUTURE WORK
the relay. Also, the message “MOTOR ON” is sent to the The performance of the system can be further
mobile number of the farmer, that is stored in the system. improved in terms of the operating speed, memory capacity,
Similarly when the soil is wet, the sensor output and instruction cycle period of the microcontroller by using
voltage is about 29.5 mV which is the input to op-amp. The other controllers such as AVRs and PICs. The number of
voltage is amplified in the op-amp and the output of 33.4 mV channels can be increased to interface more number of
is given to microcontroller. This voltage is not enough to sensors which is possible by using advanced versions of
drive the relay and hence the relay is turned off. Also, the Microcontrollers.
message “MOTOR OFF” is sent to the same mobile number. The system can be modified with the use of a data
Table 1 shows the reading obtained from sensor, OP-AMP logger and a graphical LCD panel showing the measured
output and relay condition. sensor data over a period of time.
This system can be connected to communication
devices such as modems, cellular phones or satellite terminal
to enable the remote collection of recorded data or alarming
of certain parameters.
Table 1 : Results
IX REFERENCES
[1]. M. Dursun and S. Ozden. A wireless application of drip

irrigation automation supported by soil moisture
sensors. Scientific Research and Essays, Vol. 6(7):1573
-1582, 2011.
[2]. Sensors and wireless sensor networks for irrigation
management under decit conditions, International
Conference on Agricultural Engineering (AgEng2008),
2008.
[3]. Intelligent Humidity Sensor for - Wireless Sensor
Network Agricultural Application. International Journal
of Wireless & Mobile Networks Vol. 3, No. 1, February
2011.
Mr.Sundar Ganesh C S was born

on 13th July 1981 in Sellur,
Madurai India. He completed his
programme in Electrical and
Electronics Engineering in 2003
from Government College of
Engineering, Tirunelveli. He did
his post graduation in Applied Electronics from PSG College
of Technology Coimbatore India in the year 2008. After
completion of his UG he was worked as a Lecturer in MNSK
college of Engineering for 1year 5 months. He worked as a
part-time lecturer in Government College of Engineering,
Tirunelveli. Currently he is working as an Assistant Professor
in department of RAE at PSG college of Technology,
Coimbatore.

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Mr.

Efficient Automatic Plant Irrigation System using

Abstract: In this paper an automatic plant irrigation .

Mr. Sundar Ganesh C S working as Assistant Professor in PSG College of

. Fig.4 Connection Diagram of Real Time Clock

When Vcc falls below 1.25 times VBAT, the device

Fig.3 Functional Block Diagram of MCP3208 ADC VI.MODEM

communication with the network. The SIM300 is integrated

Dry 2.85 V 4.72 V ON

Wet 29.5 mV 33.4 mV OFF

Efficient irrigation management is a major concern

[1]. M. Dursun and S. Ozden. A wireless application of drip

Mr.Sundar Ganesh C S was born

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