Greenhouse Monitoring and Automation Using Arduino: a Review on Precision Farming and Internet of Things (IoT)

The 21st century became the beginning of the development of information technology, where one of the revolutions was the presence of the Internet of Things. Internet of Things or abbreviated as IoT is a technology that combines electronic devices, sensors, and the internet to manage data and applications. The Internet of Things can be adopted in agriculture for crop management as a media for monitoring and controlling, especially in greenhouses and is called Precision Farming. The application of precision farming will be more effective in a greenhouse because it is easier to engineer similar environmental conditions. IoT development in greenhouses is using Arduino Microcontroller or Raspberry Pi Microcomputer. These devices are used because the price is low and easy to get on the market and can be designed so that technicians who have limited information technology knowledge can run it. To be able to manage greenhouses with IoT requires sensors as five senses that can detect changes that occur in the greenhouse. By using sensors, the hardware can detect what is happening in the greenhouse and make decisions based on the data acquired. Some sensors that are often used in Precision Farming are temperature and humidity sensors, soil moisture sensors, and light sensors. In the Internet of Things, the data that has been acquired by the hardware will then be transmitted wirelessly. The wireless connections used are Bluetooth, ZigBee Protocol, and Wi-Fi, where Bluetooth and Zigbee connections have a short distance between 10 - 100 meters, while Wi-Fi has a longer distance especially when connected to the Internet. The purpose of this paper is to understand the advantages and challenges of adopting IoT-based Precision Farming for monitoring and automation.