A Design of IoT-based Platform for Monitoring Environmental Factors Affecting Plant Growth

In response to the future food shortest crisis, the World Government Summit in 2018 released a report entitled "Agriculture 4.0 - The Future of Agricultural Technology" to describe the application of emerging Industry 4.0 technologies to agriculture such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, and smart sensors. Environmental factors are known to affect plant growth include light, temperature, water, humidity and nutrition. Thus, it's very important to understand how those factors affect plant growth and development. A wireless IoT monitoring platform is proposed in this paper to collect four environmental data for the study of factors affecting soil water evaporation. It is achieved by the development of wireless sensor network (WSN) modules to cope with different types of sensor for temperature, humidity, sun-light and water tension. First, four types of environmental data are collected through the interface designed in the proposed WSN module. The collected data is then uploaded to the cloud database via a 2G/3G/4G LTE router. Finally, the code MySQL is employed for the data management and analysis while code MATLAB is used for data visualization to facilitate analysis and comparison. A comparison of the collected information and the data obtained from the Hsinchu Weather Station, Central Weather Bureau (CWB), Taiwan, R.O.C. is obtained to demonstrate the success of the proposed design.