Remote monitoring and control of horticultural cool storage over the Internet

In this article, a distributed architecture that allows remote control and monitoring of horticultural cool storage (HCS) is presented. The various stages in the design and implementation of system for monitoring temperature and relative humidity and controlling HCS environment conditions are presented and discussed. The required hardware include a microcontroller and accompanying electronic circuitry, a server computer, serial port, temperature and relative humidity sensors and two actuators. Microcontroller transfers the sensors data to the server via serial port. Both the client and the server side programs are coded in VB programming language. They use VB MSComm control in order to communicate with the microcontroller. Internet communications is relied on socket programming. Winsock is used for network communications via the TCP/IP protocol. Sockets are configured to listen to a data port or to connect and then transmit to a remote one. Consequently information can be easily and reliably transmitted, monitored and/or controlled by the two machines. The performance of system was evaluated for 2 weeks and the results were quite satisfactory. This system can be easily adapted in other agricultural facilities such as greenhouses and silos. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 19: 136–145, 2011