Monitoring

This section shows all possibilities regarding live monitoring. If you don't want to mess with programming at all, please check out the chapter Expected System Behavior, in which you will find a so-called fuzzy logic approach helping you to run and maintain your system.

Regarding the live monitoring, the test system is coupled with an Arduino Mega and several sensors such as pH (acidity or alkalinity of the nutrient solution; Gravity PH sonde V2), electrical conductivity EC (the number of dissolved ion in the nutrient solution; Gravity EC sensor), temperature and humidity (DHT22 sensor) and Water temperature. Additionally, an WIFI module (ESP8266) updates the measurements to Thingspeak, which is a free to use IoT platform from MathWorks. There, the data is shown clearly in self-updating graphs.

It would be rather easy to also implement the presumable system behavior regarding pH and EC for the days to come and to give the grower important hints on what to look out for. These predictions would have to be calculated on Thingspeak as well and would need periodic updates to match the theoretical outcome with the real progress. An alert is also includeable, warning the user on sensor measurements not being in the desired range.

Link to References