An IoT based Low-cost Weather Monitoring System for Smart Farming

Background: Weather monitoring is an important aspect of crop cultivation for reducing economic loss while increasing productivity. Weather is the combination of current meteorological components, such as temperature, wind direction and speed, amount and kind of precipitation, sunshine hours and so on. The weather defines a time span ranging from a few hours to several days. The periodic or continuous surveillance or the analysis of the status of the atmosphere and the climate, including parameters such as temperature, moisture, wind velocity and barometric pressure, is known as weather monitoring. Because of the increased usage of the internet, weather monitoring has been upgraded to smart weather monitoring. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the new technology that can help with many precision farming operations. Smart weather monitoring is one of the precision agriculture technologies that use sensors to monitor correct weather. The main objective of the research is to design a smart weather monitoring and real-time alert system to overcome the issue of monitoring weather conditions in agricultural farms in order for farmers to make better decisions. Methods: Different sensors were used in this study to detect temperature and humidity, pressure, rain, light intensity, CO2 level, wind speed and direction in an agricultural farm and real time clock sensor was used to measured real time weather data. The major component of this system was an Arduino Uno microcontroller and the system ran according to a program written in the Arduino Uno software. Result: This is a low-cost smart weather monitoring system. This system’s output unit were a liquid crystal display and a GSM900A module. The weather data was displayed on a liquid crystal display and the GSM900A module was used to send the data to a mobile phone. This smart weather station was used to monitor real-time weather conditions while sending weather information to the farmer’s mobile phone, allowing him to make better decisions to increase yield.