Automated IoT enabled vertical farming: Planting atypical crops in an urban environment

• Main Authors: Dim, Floyd Robert Cocabo, Guillermo, Daniel Lester Costes
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Internet of things; Vertical gardening—Automation; Digital Communications and Networking
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_ece/10; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=etdb_ece
• Institution: De La Salle University

Smart gardening and indoor farming become more popular as technology improves, and this paper tackles this with Arduino and soil-based farming. This is due to the reduction of cost and complexity when compared to soilless farming methods. A system for monitoring the plants’ conditions was made by studying the most important parameters for a plants growth and developing the system based on that. Actuators and sensors were used in monitoring and controlling the conditions of the plants while they were growing. The type of plants grown were plants that do not thrive in the conditions of an urban environment, and to prove the effectiveness of the system developed, a separate batch of plants that did not use the developed system was grown alongside the plants that used the developed system. After four weeks of testing, the height of basil, lettuce and spinach are 73.13%, 84.33% and 90.38% respectively. Through visual analysis, it can also be observed that the color of the plants grown by the system are greener and healthier. With the results, it can be concluded that plants grown indoors with the IoT enabled Arduino vertical garden, are healthier than plants grown traditionally in the same environment. Key Words – Vertical Garden, Arduino, IoT, Automation