Design and Development of Electronic Device for Quantitative Determination of Pesticides present in Fruit Samples

Pesticides have turned out to be an obligatory input to agriculture and public health. Versatile use of pesticides has resulted in contamination of all basic necessities of life, i.e. air, water and food. According to National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) malathion and chlorpyrifos are the most extensively used organophosphates. Due to low persistency and high killing efficiency of pesticides, many agriculturalists regularly use this group of pesticides for the production of various fruits. This paper primarily aims at developing an easy, low cost and convenient to use, model for measurement of pesticide concentration in a given Fruit. It uses a LASER diode as the optical source and a phototransistor as the sensor. Based on the intensity of light received by the phototransistor when a LASER diode is flashed on the given fruit sample, a corresponding voltage is developed at the output terminals of the phototransistor, which is the analog value. This analog value is converted to digital value with the help of an Arduino. The threshold value is set in the Arduino based on which the percentage is calculated and displayed on the LCD and in the Bluetooth terminal application installed in the smartphone. The objective of this paper is to prevent consumers from consuming the fruits which are contaminated with high dosages of pesticides.