IoT based hydroponic system with supplementary LED light for smart home farming of lettuce

Current agriculture advancement is being challenged like never before with sustainable food production and security in a demographically obese world. Climate change is another major challenge that contemporary farming practice tries to overcome. Conventional soil dependent farming practices make farmers vulnerable to various manifestations of climate change. Different technologies were employed to enable farming practices to adapt and build resilience against irregular microclimate shifts. It is imperative that modern farmers need to be equipped with precise management and monitoring of the crop system with access to the scientific data about the field environment to execute intelligent and informed decisions in time. Alternate farming technology like hydroponic culture technique and integration of smart artificial light and IoT system are deemed promising solutions to the aforementioned problems. In this study, we have developed a smart hydroponic system with LED lighting technology enabled by IoT system. Plants were hydroponically cultured under various treatments and morphological parameters were measured and characterized. The plants treated with blue supplementary LED light resulted in greater accumulation of biomass, leaf density, leaf area and pigment content. IoT devices and software applications were incorporated to transmit and display of system information online. The system was successful in archiving data real time for end user access.