IoT Backyard: Smart watering control system

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. Nowadays, cropping own organic homegrown plants for health and safety are becoming increasingly demands for many people. However, some of them do not have time to take care the plants. Therefore, this project introduces an IoT Backyard system as a gardening tool to monitor and control watering for homegrown plants. We apply the Internet of things (IoT) and affordable technology and focus on soil-based plant with a water tank and tap. The system is divided into 3 parts: (1) microcontroller system composites of NodeMCU V3 for sending and receiving sensoring data to and from the Firebase and transfer data to Arduino UNO to control watering sensors, (2) the Firebase system performs as a NoSQL database system to collect and store monitoring sensor data as well as plant profiles setby users, and (3) IoT Backyard mobile application, users can choose or add plant profiles to crop, monitor water sensoring data, andswitch on or off the automated watering plant. The results show our design prototype, water control testings, power consumption and cost estimation.