Enhanced IoT-Based Climate Control for Oyster Mushroom Cultivation Using Fuzzy Logic Approach and NodeMCU Microcontroller

Abstract

Urban farming has the potential to utilise unused space in the community to alleviate food shortages and increase the community’s income through local food production. When Internet of Things (IoT) technology is integrated with urban farming, it can further improve its efficiencies and yield. The work in this paper improved our previous work of using an IoT-based climate control system to regulate the cultivation environment of oyster mushrooms automatically. Even though the climate control system could produce two batches of mushroom yields, there were several limitations, such as less efficient climate control due to threshold-based corrective action, water wastage, and system instability. This paper aims to address these stated limitations by implementing a fuzzy logic algorithm and redesigned the climate control system. Two crisp input variables from DHT22 sensors representing temperature and humidity were fed into the Node MCU microcontroller’s fuzzy logic coded in C language. The temperature and humidity conditions were divided into five fuzzy trapezoidal membership functions resulting in 25 fuzzy rules to control the duration of running the water pump and ventilation fan. An internal, lightweight web server were managed all HTTP client requests. The enhanced system also included a safety measurement to avoid overheating the microcontroller and causing water wastage. Upon analysis of the data captured in two months, the result showed a decrease of 40% in water utilisation and an increase of mushrooms yield up to 226%. The enhanced climate control system also facilitated maintaining and controlling the temperature and humidity conducive for optimal mushroom cultivation.