Water Level Controller with Weather Forecasting Using 8051 Microcontroller

Water management is a salient role of engineers due to its importance in everyday activities. The proposed work aims to eliminate over- and under-irrigation, as well as water waste, by monitoring soil moisture and enabling automatic switching of the pumping system to adjust the moisture level. Along with the soil moisture levels, the weather forecast is also considered to regulate the moisture level. The proposed design implements a water level controller by tracking the soil moisture levels using an 8051 microcontroller and interfacing it with sensors. A threshold value is set, for both lower and higher values of soil moisture and the live value is constantly compared. When the value is below or above the respective lower and higher threshold values, the motor pumping system is automatically turned on or off respectively. The output values are observed using a web application via an Arduino board. The design also uses Node MCU which is integrated with ThingSpeak to aggregate and store data. The web application has an additional feature of weather forecasts, which is live data obtained using an Application Programming Interface (API) key with Weatherstack API. This weather forecast is used to control the motor and automatically change its state based on the soil's present state of moisture level and the weather that day. This feature makes the design more reliable and practical for integrating it with mainstream agriculture and gardening activities.