Internet of Things (IoT) based smart system for white button mushroom farming

Abstract

Agriculture techniques keep on improving day by day. Adapting modern agricultural technology plays an important role in improving overall efficiency as well as the productivity of their yields. In modern agriculture, Internet of Things (IoT) connects farmers to their farm via the sensors so that they could easily monitor the real-time conditions of their farm and control environmental parameters from anywhere. White Button Mushroom is a widely cultivated crop among farmers. Although being the most consumed and high demand cash crop, it is still overshadowed by the traditional cultivation approach which is resulting in low productivity, high manpower efficiency, more effort and cost. This work aims to develop a monitoring and controlling system to monitor and control the environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, moisture and lighting conditions of the white button mushroom farm. It enables a user to monitor crucial factors such as temperature, humidity, moisture, the light intensity on a mushroom farm through the end devices. White Button Mushroom requires optimum temperature ranging from 22°C to 25°C* and humidity from 70% to 90%*. It needs good quality compost with well integrated moisture level of about 60% to 70%* whereas dim bright lighting conditions* inside the mushroom farm. Sensors are placed on fixed location and spots of the farm. Then, the sensors measure the status of parameters which are transmitted to the remote monitoring station via a low power Node MCU and finally they are able to monitor conditions of a mushroom farm through platforms such as Node-RED, ThingSpeak, Blynk. The codes for the controller are written in the Arduino programming language, debugged, compiled, and burnt into the microcontroller using the Arduino integrated development environment. Along with this a programming tool called Node-RED is used for wiring together the hardware devices. It provides a browser-based editor that makes it easy to wire together flows using the wide range of nodes in palette that can be deployed to its runtime in a single-click for monitoring and controlling of the environmental parameters of the farm. The result shows successful monitoring and controlling of environmental conditions accessing the internet from anywhere. It minimizes human efforts and automates production, which could be beneficial to farmers.