WSN System Warns Producer When Micro-Sprinklers Fail in Fruit Trees

Abstract

Salts in the irrigation water cause micro-sprinklers to clog. Farmers find it difficult to detect sprinkler clog due to the great number of trees grown in commercial orchards, causing a reduction in yield and timing problems. In this article, IoT can support farmers with daily soil moisture detection. A wireless sensor network, WSN was developed to warn the farmer from micro-sprinkling clogging. Trees were gathered into groups of 9 trees, where the central tree holds the master microcontroller and the other eight trees presented slave microcontrollers (nodes). The system uses BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) to communicate between the master microcontroller by BLE. A second WSN using lasers was also tested but resulted to be a little more expensive. Soil moisture sensor performance against corrosion and current consumption was analyzed being the best sensors the V1.2 capacitance probe and the sprinkler-encoder one. When micro-sprinklers did not apply water to a tree, its number was transmitted via LoRa from the master to the producer’s smartphone to warn him/her. A hexacopter was used to detect canopy stress from a height of 30 m, but only after 7 days of water removal did the NDVI indexes detect it.