Smart Soil Monitoring Application (Case Study: Rwanda)

Internet of things has changed the way of working and monitoring things in different domain; through this paper; the internet of things is applied in agriculture for monitor the composition of soil parameters such as soil potential Hydrogen (pH), moisture, humidity and temperature. The proposed Smart Soil Monitoring Application (SSMA) collects accurate, reliable, timely data of soil status. Collected data play a big role in decision making for selecting the appropriate type of crops and the type and the quantity of required fertilizer for a particular soil in different areas in Rwanda. In this paper, data for soil compositions were collected by sensors and collected data are sent to microcontroller unit (nodeMCU) to be analyzed. The Smart Soil Monitoring Application system consists of a nodeMCU, Soil pH sensor for collecting pH data, moisture sensor to sense presense of water in soil and DHT11 for collecting data about humidity and temperature. Also, a ESP8266 WiFi module enables the system to send the sensed data to the cloud for storage and processing. A Processed data are displayed on dashboard (web based application) and accessed by farmers via an android application installed in their smart phone. The obtained preliminary results confirm the efficiency of the proposed SSMA for real-time monitoring soil parameters and thus contributing to the growth of farm production in Rwanda.