Automated Hydroponic System using IoT for Indoor Farming

Hydroponics is a farming method in which the crops are grown without the use of soil. The plants are placed in a water solution enriched with macro and micronutrients essential for plant growth. Hydroponics is also called as Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). In traditional farming, soil erosion and infertility of soil plays a major role by decreasing the crop yields. The use of pesticides is also a major concern. This paper proposes a fully automated Internet of Things (IoT) based hydroponic system which senses, monitors and controls important factors like pH, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), environmental temperature, humidity and lighting inside the green house. Assortment of 7 sensors along with 6 actuators helped in developing the proposed system. With the usage of IoT a mobile application is developed for real time viewing of environmental and nutritional variables. A user notification is given in the mobile application if there are anomalous conditions detected in the green house. User would be able to view the green house with the mobile application, with the help of camera that is interfaced for live viewing. MQTT protocol is responsible for exchanging the data within remote devices and controllers. The crop selected for experimenting the proposed hydroponic model is coriander, which was monitored for 18 days and good results were seen. This proposed system demonstrates successful hydroponic system that is completely automated which reduces the manual labor work and grows a completely chemical and pesticide free crops.