Ideas wanted for farm data collection

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scottmurchison
 
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Joined: Tue Mar 19, 2013 10:29 am

Ideas wanted for farm data collection

Post by scottmurchison »

My son started a hops farm and as his father, I have been helping out where I can. With my technical background, I want to introduce automation. He will have many irrigation lines to water his hops and I want to create a system whereby we can monitor water flow in multiple water lines when the crops are being irrigated. A simple plugged filter can mean that little or no water is flowing in any line. I have found the YF-S201 flow sensors, which should do the trick. What I'd like next is to spec out what a typical sensor setup (node) would look like and what cloud service I would use. I'm investigating Adafruit because of the great products and knowledge they have. From my research, I see each node consisting of core components such as;

- water flow sensor
- Arduino or Raspberry Pi (with RTC)
- GSM module
- SIM card
- battery
- solar charger for battery

The process now is to visit the farm, manually set up generators and pumps and pump water for 2 hours at a time per irrigation line. There is no electricity at the farm yet. Since we only need flow data when actually irrigating, there is no need to run the circuit all the time and we need a way to "wake up" each sensor to start recording. Perhaps that means waking up regularly to see if water is flowing yet and shutting down if it is not.

Anyways, if anyone has experience with similar remote data collection applications, I'd be interested in hearing from you about how you architected it. I'd like to keep the cost as low as I can for each module and have the option to monitor other parameters such as soil moisture, temperature, wind, etc.

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Disciple
 
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Re: Ideas wanted for farm data collection

Post by Disciple »

I can point to another project for remote measuring of a different example of water flow.
It used a self contained solar power solution that might be suitable. Best of success.

Microcontroller monitored sensing in remote areas of Arizona

Hallelujah!
Disciple

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brubell
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Re: Ideas wanted for farm data collection

Post by brubell »

we need a way to "wake up" each sensor to start recording. Perhaps that means waking up regularly to see if water is flowing yet and shutting down if it is not.
You'll want to use the Deep Sleep functionality of your microcontroller - check out the Adafruit SleepyDog library on GitHub or examples of this on learn.adafruit.com

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