Design of Automatic Drain System for Freshwater Fish Pond Based on ZigBee Networks and SMS Gateway

The growth of freshwater fish farming home industry raises a technology needed to make the process more effective and efficient. The drain process of the pond is an important process business for freshwater fish farmer to cultivate all those fish successfully. To make the drain process more flexible and efficient, the automatic draining system for freshwater fish pond is emerged. This study proposed the design of automatic drain system for freshwater fish pond by utilizing ZigBee wireless networks and SMS gateway. The message became a trigger for system to start. For rural place, SMS protocol is the best way to make a reliable communication with the device. While ZigBee wireless protocol was used for data communication among all devices. Using mesh topology, the system consisted of three nodes which were coordinator, end device 1, and end device 2. The coordinator had a role to manage the ZigBee networks, to receive SMS incoming message, and to open the input water valve at once. The end device 1 had a role to measure water level using a sensor. While end device 2 had a role to open the output water valve. When the drain system was activated, the sensor of end device 1 node checked the water level condition. Referring to the sensor data, coordinator manage input and output water valve to do drainage system. The hardware design utilized EM357 SoC for ZigBee transceiver, ATmega328P for the microcontroller, SIM800L for the SMS gateway, US-100 ultrasonic sensor, and solenoid valve 12VDC. After prototype was tested on styrofoam box as a pond, the functional requirements had been done. The ZigBee based automatic drain system could be installed like it was designed. After prototyping, it was needed to change the integer data type from water level sensor to uint8_t in order to make the data can be transmitted through the ZigBee network. Also the delay parameter in microcontroller program affected the performance of the system.