Data Acquisition and Actuation for Aquaponics using IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of interconnected devices ranging from sensors to actuators in real time on the internet. This new age technology is revolutionary in terms of reducing to almost replacing the human intervention and need into day to day mundane activities by replacing humans with this interconnected network. This network has the great capability of scalability and on the run connectivity. The network is similar to an ad-hoc network but with a difference of the internet as its communication backbone. It has a wide range of applications in the fields of healthcare, automobile, construction, education, hospitality, corporate sector etc. We are using IoT in the field of agriculture, aquaponics in specific. Aquaponics is an emerging field of agriculture which is a hybrid between hydroponics (soil-less farming) and aquaculture (fish-farming). Aquaponic farming removes a lot of the disadvantages present in the individual parent techniques. In this farming method freshwater fish and plants are cultivated in a closed loop ecosystem where they depend on each other to grow. Aquaponics by itself is not perfect, it has its own set of problems. It is a simulation of a natural ecosystem where there are many factors involved in running and managing the farm and a drastic change could cause farm failure. This results in a massive knowledge barrier for this farming technique. Constant monitoring of the different parameters gives us an insight as to how the farm is performing. We propose a completely flexible and scalable control system for aquaponic farming. This control system will monitor various environmental parameters and over time it will be able to manipulate the functioning of the farm to provide a completely automated system.