E-Farming

This project is our 1st Hackathon project. Our team Codezillas is working on it.

Today people are running for our needs. Why are we running? Most of us are only for food and some of us mostly for food. Food is our basic need and agriculture is the only way to make food. Therefore, developing agriculture is our responsibility. Agriculture face a lot of problems and challenges because of population, industrialization and climate changes and education-based lifestyle.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly developing field. It has a wide range of applications in the Industry. Adopting IoT in agricultural sector will give efficient results. This Project mainly focuses on automating irrigation and providing feedbacks to users through a website or a mobile phone. The IoT device can also be used to manually control the irrigation from a remote location.

Not only In Sri Lanka but also other developing countries, agriculture is the backbone of its economy, but due to many difficulties faced by the farmers the development of agriculture is very poor. Problems faced by farmers are most of them are moving towards city, government is unable to provide sufficient support, drought and floods often affect the plantation, most of they follow conventional methods and time spent in farming reduced due to urbanization.

We have created a E-Farming (E-farm) device as a solution to the above problems. This device can make farming efficient and helpful for people in urban areas with less knowledge in agriculture. The Device consists of solenoid valve to control water flow, GSM shield to communicate with server, temperature, humidity and light level sensors and powered by a Solar cell. By analyzing the soil, our solution suggests the moisture and pH levels needed for each types of crops. We can control irrigation from anywhere at any time. In this project our team use the OpenWeatherMap’s weather API and Google Maps API. In this project device collects the sensor data and sends it to the server. The user can monitor the environmental conditions and make decisions. They can visit to our website and send commands the device or can simply send an SMS to the device to control (E.g. — to start irrigation manually). SMS feature is mainly added for the farmers, especially in rural areas without access to the internet or smartphones.

The device is planted and tested successfully in rural farming land. Since it has a solar cell and battery, it can sustain for a long time without any maintenance. E-Farm has received favorable feedback from users, since they just have to plug in the field and all the monitoring and irrigation will be done automatically. When the user selects the crop type in the website, the threshold values are updated to the device. so About 10 unique crops can be used currently. Having weather prediction onboard, user can minimize the water usage. (E.g. — prediction of raining).

Our future works are use more deep learning on the big data collected from devices regarding plantation environment, try to predict the optimum conditions for maximum throughput, make the device more portable and less expensive, integrate more sensors to gather different attributes of agricultural land, create child sensor nodes and main control device for big farms. We are in the starting stage of implementation. We hope it will be a agricultural revolution. It will encourage youngsters to do agriculture.

Our Codezillas members are Tharmasanthiran Aathman , nirojan thiya , Sivarasa Lavanaraj , sriyoukan sriranjan

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