An IoT-Enabled Multi-Sensor System with Location Detection for Agricultural Applications

Real-time environmental data acquisition and monitoring is a significant aspect of IoT-enabled farming to overcome the constraints in present day’s farming that includes regular monitoring of agricultural fields and adjacent weather-related information. Real-time monitoring can be achieved by measuring various parameters such as humidity, pressure, temperature and location data using sensors. The humidity, pressure and temperature data help in environmental monitoring of the farming zone, and the latitude and longitude data enable specific location-based farming. The measured parameters are to be communicated to the primary users efficiently in real time. This work showcases the concept of IoT-enabled farming in line with agriculture 4.0 where a hardware module consisting of a Raspberry Pi, SenseHat and low-cost, compact GPS receiver is implemented for agricultural applications. This idea would be useful for cost-effective IoT research, application development and for data recording in harsh and constrained environmental conditions with advantages of compact size and low power consumptions. The module design has a dimension of 20 × 11cm 2 and has a temperature accuracy of ± 2 °C, humidity in the 20–80% RH range with an accuracy ± 4.5%, pressure sensor with 260–1260 hPa absolute range with ± 0.1 hPa under normal conditions, and the GPS sensor has an accuracy of 2.5 m. The proposed system is made Wi-Fi enabled to acquire data in the server for the primary users.