International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Bhosale Srushti G, Dongare Shweta S, Kabadi Savali S, Professor Bangar A. P, Professor Bhosale S. B
Abstract: Water shortage and inefficient forms of irrigation are the two most pressing challenges facing world agriculture today, especially in less developed countries. Numerous farmers still utilize manual irrigation or fixed-time based scheduling that leads to excessive water usage, uneven crop growth, and economic loss in many cases. To solve these problems, this work offers the design, implementation and experimental validation of an IoT Based Smart Drip Irrigation System (ISDIS) which automatically controls irrigation by monitoring real-time soil moisture and ambient weather condition. Soil moisture sensors used in the system are the capacitive type and connected to the DHT11/DHT22 temperature-humidity sensor via a NodeMCU/ESP32 microcontroller. Data from the sensors is uploaded over encrypted Wi-Fi after every 10 seconds to the Firebase Realtime Database. Farmers can monitor their field conditions remotely using an Android application developed in Java/XML. The valve actuation is governed by a dual-criteria decision algorithm. (i) Irrigation is activated when the soil volumetric water content (VWC) is below a calibrated threshold, and (ii) Irrigation is proactively deferred when a rain forecast for greater than 5 mm occurs within a 12-hour window based on data from the OpenWeatherMap API. Through empirical validation over a cultivation cycle of 90 days, the system was able to achieve an overall water saving of 35.02%, the soil VWC stability was enhanced by 66.49% an average actuation delay of 2.1 s, and average crop-yield increase of 19.5% over five crops when compared to the Fixed-Schedule Irrigation (FSI). Through the timely deferral of 14 irrigation cycles based on meteorological forecasting, the system was successfully realized at a hardware cost of approximately USD 30, providing a low-cost scalable energy-efficient framework for precision agriculture and sustainable smart farming.
