Development of an IoT-based Water Temperature Control and Monitoring System for Hydroponics

Hydroponics has gained popularity over the past several years because of its capacity to grow nutrient-rich crops with the least number of resources. This project concentrates on the development of an IoT-based water temperature control and monitoring system meant for a hydroponic system. Water temperature is a crucial element in hydroponics and indeed must be kept at a certain temperature range between 19 to 27 degrees Celsius. This is to enhance its effectiveness. To control the temperature, a cooling core made up of thermoelectric modules TEC1-12706 will be used in this water-cooling system. The basic function of thermoelectric modules TEC1-12706 is to heat or cool. However, this project only focused on the cooling part due to the fact that the temperature in Malaysia is normally between 25 to 30 degrees Celsius which is over the temperature ranges for hydroponics, thus a heating process is not necessary. This project involves both software and hardware implementation. A TEC1-12706, ESP32 Wi-Fi module, R385 water pump, and DS18B20 sensor are used in this cooling system. The circulating water system is proposed to be utilized in this project to keep the water temperature in the water tank evenly distributed. An experiment with various settings has been conducted in the presence of one to two TEC1-12706. The results show that when the two TEC1-12706 were connected in parallel, it will only take around 30 minutes to cool the water temperature down to 26 degrees Celsius as compared to the other configurations.