ZigBee-based irrigation system for home gardens

Single-chip microcontrollers equipped with wireless transceivers are gaining popularity in smart home automation because of their built-in resources, low power consumption, size, affordability and durability. Research and development professionals are seizing the opportunity to design and integrate more functions and services for smart home monitoring and control systems utilizing such microcontrollers. This paper presents a wireless irrigation system for a smart home garden that can be integrated with existing smart home control systems. The system consists of slave nodes and a master station each of which is equipped with a wireless microcontroller. Each slave node is equipped with a temperature sensor, a soil-moister sensor, a water valve, a microcontroller and a zigbee transceiver. The slave microcontroller reads and frames the surrounding temperature of the garden´s grass and trees along with soil moisture. Then, the frame is forwarded to the master station via a zigbee ad-hoc network. The master station has an embedded fuzzy logic irrigation algorithm to water the grass and trees based on a set of rules. A home web-server is interfaced with the master station for remote access monitoring and operation. The proposed system can be operated as a stand-alone unit or can be integrated with existing home automation systems.