A PC based system to monitor and control growth parameters of plants

Abstract

Lacking appropriate mechanisms to monitor and control growth parameters of plants, such as temperature, humidity and light intensity has become a major issue of modern process control applications in agriculture. Therefore, introducing a PC based system to monitor and control the above parameters is of utmost importance in the field of agriculture in Sri Lanka. This paper shows the simplicity of designing such a PC based system to solve the previously described problem, using a high-level programming language and simple hardware components. The entire system comprises of three major modules; the first one supports measuring and monitoring temperature, light intensity and relative humidity while another module stores those measurements in a database for future acquisition. The third module performs controlling of the deviations of growth parameters automatically. Cost cutting of the system is one of the most important facts which improve the reasonableness of the system. The data are inputted to the PC through the parallel port, monitored through a user friendly GUI and stored in database for future use. This system has been tested on several environmental conditions to investigate the performance and accuracy and it has reached its objectives to a greater extent.