README.md

Design and development of an embedded system for plant health monitoring

Overview

The purpose of this project is to illustrate the design and development of an embedded system in order to acquire data related to the health and environmental conditions of a plant. Furtherly, this system deals with the maintaining of an optimal soil moisture level for the plant. The system can acquire and process soil moisture, air humidity, temperature and brightness values, and also control irrigation by a submersible water pump. Via Wi-Fi communication, the collected data are sent to Measurify, an API framework with a database used to memorize these values and to successively interface with a smartphone application developed with Flutter. The application allows the user to visualize the current state of the values and a chart showing the previous measurements.

Hardware

The following hardware components have been used:

• Arduino UNO WiFi rev2
• Sparkfun Weather Shield
• Capacitive soil moisture sensor v1.2
• 5v Relay Module
• Arduino water pump

Software

Arduino

These Arduino's libraries have been used:

• <WiFiNINA.h>
• <SparkFunWeatherShield.h>
• <ArduinoHttpClient.h>
• <ArduinoJson.h>
• <WiFiUdp.h>
• <TimeLib.h>

Flutter

During the development of the smartphone application these Flutter libraries have been used:

• http/http.dart
• syncfusion_flutter_charts/charts.dart

Quick start

As a first step, you need to make the connections between the hardware components, as shown in the figure.

After that, you need to connect Arduino to a PC using an USB cable, download the Arduino IDE and select the Arduino UNO Wifi rev2 board and port. Then you need to install the libraries mentioned above by the Library Manager of the Arduino IDE. The SparkFunWeatherShield library, however, must be installed from the web and included in the project following these steps: Sketch -> Include Library -> Add .ZIP Library…. Now you can open sketch_tesi.ino and set SSID and password of the Wifi network you want to connect in the file arduino_secrets.h. To verifing that the program properly works you need to upload it on the Arduino board and read the prints of the Serial Monitor.

In order to use the smartphone application you have to install Flutter and VSCode. Then you can open the repository tesi_app in VSCode and run main.dart following these instructions. Now you should be able to see the two pages of the app showing the measurements saved on Measurify.