MeteoMex: open infrastructure for networked environmental monitoring and agriculture 4.0

Abstract

Air, water, and soil are essential for terrestrial life, but pollution, overexploitation, and climate change jeopardize the availability of these primary resources. Thus, assuring human health and food production requires efficient strategies and technologies for environmental protection. Knowing key parameters such as soil moisture, air, and water quality is essential for smart farming and urban development. The MeteoMex project aims to build simple hardware kits and their integration into current Internet-of-Things (IoT) platforms. This paper shows the use of low-end Wemos D1 mini boards to connect environmental sensors to the open-source platform ThingsBoard. Two printed circuit boards (PCB) were designed for mounting components. Analog, digital and I2C sensors are supported. The Wemos ESP8266 microchip provides WiFi capability and can be programed with the Arduino IDE. Application examples for the MeteoMex aeria and terra kits demonstrate their functionality for air quality, soil, and climate monitoring. Further, a prototype for monitoring wastewater treatment is shown, which exemplifies the capabilities of the Wemos board for signal processing. The data are stored in a PostgreSQL database, which enables data mining. The MeteoMex IoT system is highly scalable and of low cost, which makes it suitable for deployment in agriculture 4.0, industries, and public areas. Circuit drawings, PCB layouts, and code examples are free to download from https://github.com/robert-winkler/MeteoMex.