Jol-Shinchon: Design and development of a sensor based intelligent auto irrigation system

摘要

Agriculture is the mainstay for Bangladesh and the provision of water is an important factor that determines the output of the agriculture sector. Since natural water availability is prone to many aspects of nature such as rain and capacity of rain-water reservoir, irrigation or alternative supply of water becomes a critical element in agriculture. The existing irrigation mechanisms through the motor-pumps are heavily dependent on fossil fuel regarded as an offender in the carbon footprint debacle. The poor farmers find themselves with insurmountable hurdles as they are constrained by the financial cost on fuel. The profit maximization gets a major setback due to the exorbitant amount of expenditure due to fuel consumption. An innovative approach to do away with such limitation is the utilization of natural resource for irrigation purpose, an intelligent auto irrigation system which is based on the concept of harnessing the power of sun. Through the use of solar panel, sunlight is captured into the photovoltaic cells and transferred to a battery to be charged during the day. All this setting is facilitated by circuits one associated with the solar panel and the other one for detecting the presence of sunlight during the day since the system would not allow any water to flow unless it is the night time. In order to drive the pump into action, two conditions need to be fulfilled one darkness, detected by a photo resistor and the second one is the dryness of soil, to be determined by a moisture sensor, and this setting would be programmed by a platform both hardware and software with Arduino Uno. Although the charging time of the battery by solar panel would be a little lengthy, the long exposure to the sun would provide enough time and charging volume to the battery. The battery would comfortably provide a considerable duration of power to the water pump that can supply sufficient amount of water to agricultural land of any decent size.