Sensing Parameters Related to the Cultivation Environment and Hydroponic Solution for Automation Purposes

Resumen

Objective: Automation in various industrial sectors has proven to be a relevant alternative, enhancing speed and reliability of activities. It reduces task execution time, ensures greater operational efficiency, minimizes operator interventions, cuts production costs, and optimizes the production chain. This work aims to present an engineering solution regarding the sensing of environmental parameters in a hydroponic greenhouse for automation and real-time monitoring through a Human-Machine Interface developed in collaboration with another research project.
Design/methodology/approach: An ATMega 2560 microcontroller on the Arduino Mega 2560 platform, along with sensors for flow, temperature, humidity, luminosity, solution level, and flow presence, served as climate and greenhouse system readers. The open-source ScadaBR software was employed as the supervisory system for online monitoring.
Results: The developed system enabled tracking the state of the hydroponic system through a web interface with graphs illustrating changes in system parameters over time.
Findings/conclusions: The implementation of an automated monitoring and control system in a hydroponic greenhouse demonstrated the potential to improve operational efficiency, data accessibility, and crop management. By integrating low-cost sensors, open-source hardware, and ScadaBR supervisory software, it was possible to monitor temperature, humidity, luminosity, flow rate, and solution level in real time, with responsive actuators triggered when thresholds were exceeded.