Electro-Mechanical Design of Sensor-Hub for Indoor Smart Irrigation: System Prototype

A smart irrigation system, involving sensors to monitor the soil and weather parameters, helps in reducing water and power wastages. These smart systems are in general, built around Arduino board, a widely used microcontroller board, which collects the digital data from the sensors. The sensors are geographically distributed, and thus require communication modules like XBee (Zigbee), for forwarding the collected data to the edge, for further processing and transmission. While the sensors need to be exposed to soil and weather to measure the parameters accurately, the hardware needs to be protected from the environment. In this paper, the electro-mechanical design of the prototype of a standalone sensor-hub with sensors, battery pack and XBee, integrated around Arduino, for the application of indoor smart irrigation, is described and characterized. This electro-mechanical design has the advantages of being compact, standalone and scalable, and to the best of our knowledge the only design discussed so far in open literature, from electro-mechanical perspective.