88% of greenhouses in Turkey are non-automated and the use of technology at the remaining 12% is limited. The current situation in the market is riddled with prominent problems like inefficient field operation with high cost. ARDIC offers a Smart Greenhouse IoT solution for these non-automated greenhouses. It is cost-effective yet powerful, hence farmers can more easily afford it compared to traditional PLC based solutions.
Today’s farmers face a set of difficult challenges that could be listed as; increasing worldwide demand for food, changing weather conditions, limited water and fossil fuels, diminishing arable land, threats to crops’ health from pests and diseases, and the costs of dealing with these problems. These challenges can only be overcome with the help of technology. Farmers need solutions that optimize their operations, reduce their costs, and automatize the processes. Current solutions are mostly affordable by large farming companies.
We worked to create a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy IoT solution which increases the profit margin and is able to serve both large and small farms.
Agricultural IoT has become the inevitable trend of agricultural normalization. IoT applications are useful for monitoring agricultural facilities, they can establish baseline performance norms and they can trigger the rules for complex event analysis conditions related to temperature, humidity, light density, etc.
The solution: We distributed some temperature and humidity sensors inside a small greenhouse, which can collect data from both air and the soil. As a gateway we used a Raspberry Pi 3 (open hardware), on which our own version of Android (PilarOS) was running, and connected all of it through our IoT platform IoT-Ignite. (This solution is tested with the Android Things™ preview version as well, and is 100% compatible. After the full Android Things™ version is released, we will also be supporting it.)
In the smart greenhouse project, with the guidance of the greenhouse owners, we defined certain rules. There were critical ranges for temperature and humidity that needed to be monitored. A text notification to the workers is sent, whenever out-of-range values are read by the sensors. These environmental control measures ensure stable, controlled growing conditions. An integration with the sprinkler system is on the way to fully automatize the watering process.
The solution also brings more value to farmers by giving them the ability to access information about their greenhouse and to control them. In addition to the facts above, deep learning algorithms, big data and weather info could act as key contributions. This solution, and many other IoT solutions can be easily developed and built on the developer zone of our IoT platform, IoT-Ignite.
