Research Article

Cellular Automata in Plant Monitoring using Soil

Moisture Sensor With Arduino
SSSN Usha Devi N1, P Kiran Sree2
Abstract
Traditional watering to plot plants at home requires manual interaction. Improper watering to plants may
lead to ill health in pot plants at home. Automation of watering plants can be done by understanding the
plant requirement based on soil. This project focuses on a low cost soil moisture sensor with CA Arduino
Uno using IoT that senses the moisture of soil of a pot plant continuously and reports the user by sending
message, which is useful for watering plant so that plant health is monitored and maintained.

Keywords: Arduino, IOT, Cellular Automata, Plant Monitoring System

Introduction
The major components involved in this project are CA Arduino Uno and Soil Moisture Sensor. The working of the
components is given below. The CA Arduino Uno[1] [9] is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328 (datasheet). It
has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz ceramic resonator,
a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the
microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to
get started.

Literature Survey
Ibrahim Mat et. al. proposed “IoT in Precision Agriculture Applications Using Wireless Moisture Sensor Network”[5]
Explains that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of sensors and connectivity to enable application like agriculture
optimum irrigation. Wireless sensor network (WSN) and Wireless Moisture Sensor Network (WMSN) are components
of IoT. One of the important processes in agriculture is irrigation. Improper irrigation will result in waste of water.
Proper irrigation system could be achieved by using WSN technology. Monitoring and control applications have been
tremendously improved by using WSN technology. It enabled efficient communication with many sensors. WMSN is a
WSN with moisture sensors. In this study, Precision Agriculture (PA) used WMSN to enable efficient irrigation.

This paper describes about IoT and WMSN in agriculture applications particularly in greenhouse environment. This paper
explained and proved the efficiency of feedback control method in greenhouse crop irrigation. A test was conducted
to see the different these two methods. The methods are irrigation by schedule or feedback based irrigation. Irrigation
by schedule is to supply water to the plant at specific time periods. Feedback based irrigation is to irrigate plant when
the moisture or level of media wetness reached predefined value. The test shows that there is an average savings of
1,500 ml per day per tree.

Arys Carrasquilla-Batista et. al. proposed a paper “Using IoT resources to enhance the accuracy of over drain measurements
in greenhouse horticulture”[4] gives the details as follows, Climate change has already shown its negative impact that

Assistant Professor, Dept of CSE, University College of Engineering, JNTU Kakinada.

1

Professor, Dept of CSE, Shri Vishnu Engineering College for Women, Bhimavaram.
2

Correspondence: Mr. P Kiran Sree, Dept of CSE, Shri Vishnu Engineering College for Women, Bhimavaram.

E-mail Id: pkiransree@gmail.com

Orcid Id: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8601-4304

How to cite this article: Usha Devi SSSNN, Sree PK. Cellular Automata in Plant Monitoring using Soil Moisture Sensor With Arduino.
J Adv Res Comp Tech Soft Appl 2017; 4(3): 1-4.

© ADR Journals 2017. All Rights Reserved.

Usha Devi SSSNN et al. J. Adv. Res. Comp. Tech. Soft. Appl. 2017; 4(3)

has on agriculture and food production, particularly because
of rainfall deficit or excess, temperature changes and
other associated environmental variations not amenable
to sustainable agriculture. Greenhouse horticulture has
proven to be an effective way of reducing the negative
effects of climate change on vegetable production, but still
represents a challenge for farmers, because the behavior
of most plant species grown in protected environments is
markedly different from open field cultivation. To increase
the understanding of plant growth in protected crops,
Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities were integrated into
a greenhouse, thus providing a platform for researchers
that allows them to take decisions at the right time about
irrigation, moisture requirements and nutrients. The
designed system consists of electronic circuitry, sensors,
mobile communication, actuators and software running
in the cloud.
Proposed System
The proposed system contains soil moisture sensor with
CA Arduino Uno. The system continuously senses the soil
moisture value of the plant soil and alerts the user by
sending a message so that watering for the plant can be
done at right time, Which leads to healthy growth of plants.

Architecture

CA
Arduino

Uno

Plant Soil Moisture User

Sensor Mobile

Figure 1.Architecture of automatic soil moisture sensor system

The Fallowing is the visualization of modern watering system at home in reality.

Figure 2.Visualization of improved plant watering

Results through IDE. The soil Moisture is sensed as 79 showing the
dryness in soil. The soil moisture sensor leads LED glow
The circuit in Fig 3 is connected to system to run CA can be seen in Fig 4 and sends a message to user mobile
Arduino IDE. After loading the program onto CA Arduino that “ Plant is Thirsty”.

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J. Adv. Res. Comp. Tech. Soft. Appl. 2017; 4(3) Usha Devi SSSNN et al.

Figure 3.Circuitaty of Soil moisture sensor system

Figure 4.LED glow indicating low moister in soil

Figure 5.Serial Monitor Showing the Message and Moisture Level

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Usha Devi SSSNN et al.
Conclusion and Future Extension
Continuous sensing of soil moisture is done using IoT,
which intern improves plant health by watering at right
time based on the moisture. Nowadays water scarcity is
a big concern for farming. This project can be extended
to help the farmers to irrigate the farmland in an efficient
manner with automated irrigation system by adding some
more sensors like soil humidity sensor, rain sensor, freeze
sensor etc so that we can achieve tremendous result in
agriculture.
References
1. https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1682209.pdf.
2. http://www.instructables.com/id/Soil-Moisture-
Sensor/.
3. Kumar, Matti Satish, T. Ritesh Chandra, D. Pradeep
Kumar, and M. Sabarimalai Manikandan. “Monitoring
moisture of soil using low cost homemade Soil moisture
sensor and CA Arduino UNO.” In Advanced Computing
and Communication Systems (ICACCS), 2016 3rd
International Conference on, vol. 1, pp. 1-4. IEEE, 2016.
4. Carrasquilla-Batista, Arys, Alfonso Chacón-Rodríguez,
and Milton Solórzano-Quintana. “Using IoT resources
to enhance the accuracy of overdrain measurements
in greenhouse horticulture.” In Central American and
Panama Convention (CONCAPAN XXXVI), 2016 IEEE
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36th, pp. 1-5. IEEE, 2016.
5. Mat, Ibrahim, Mohamed Rawidean Mohd Kassim,
Ahmad Nizar Harun, and Ismail Mat Yusoff. “IoT in
Precision Agriculture applications using Wireless
Moisture Sensor Network.” In Open Systems (ICOS),
2016 IEEE Conference on, pp. 24-29. IEEE, 2016.
6. Athani, Suhas, C. H. Tejeshwar, Mayur M. Patil,
Priyadarshini Patil, and Rahul Kulkarni. “Soil moisture
monitoring using IoT enabled CA Arduino sensors with
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farmers and predict seasonal rainfall for planning future
harvest in North Karnataka—India.” In I-SMAC (IoT in
Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)(I-SMAC), 2017
International Conference on, pp. 43-48. IEEE, 2017.
7. Rajagopal, Shrinidhi, and Vallidevi Krishnamurthy. “OO
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Devi. “PSMACA: An automated protein structure
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