Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: Technologies for environmental and agricultural monitoring are on the rise, however, there is a lack of small, low-power, and lowcost sensing devices in the industry. One of these monitoring tools is a soil moisture sensor. Soil moisture has significant effects on crop health and yield, but commercial monitors are very expensive, require manual use, or constant attention. This calls for a simple and low-cost solution based on novel technology. In this work, we introduce smol: Sensing Soil Moisture using LoRa, a low-cost system to measure soil moisture using received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and transmission power. It is compact and can be deployed in the field to collect data automatically with little manual intervention. Our design is enabled by the phenomenon that soil moisture attenuates wireless signals, so the signal strength between a transmitter-receiver pair decreases. We exploit this physical property to determine the variation in soil moisture. We designed and tested our measurement-based prototype in both indoor and outdoor environments. With proper regression calibration, we show soil moisture can be predicted using LoRa parameters.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Language: English
Topic: Smart Agriculture and AI
Subfield: Plant Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3203744948