Hardware choices for AgriNode System- Wireless Sensor Network System
The goal of AgriNode project is to build a Wireless Sensor Network - WSN for agricultural applications such as greenhouse management, monitoring water quality for a fish farm. The system can help farmers to monitor their own farm and support them in decision-making based on sensed data. The Fig. 1 shows the AgriNode system architecture.
In this post, we demonstrate the hardware choices for the Agrinode system. To design AgriNode hardware system, we utilized low-cost electric devices that farmer can cover.
Agrinode hardware system consists of two main parts: a gateway and sensor nodes.
The gateway (Fig. 2) is a Raspberry Pi 2 with Raspbian Os which is fully compatible with Eclipse Kura - the heat of AgriNode system. A Wifi dongle is added with Raspberry Pi for establishing a WiFi connection which sensor nodes can connect to.
Fig. 2 - AgriNode Gateway
Each sensor node contains a microcontroller, power module and connected sensors. The microcontroller used in the project is an Arduino board - An Adafuit HUZZAH ESP8266 board. This board has Arduino Leonardo bootloader and also include a WiFi module - ESP8266. The power supply is typically a battery, which may also have a solar panel for charging. A sensor node can have one or more sensor attached to it of various types. For example, it may have the temperature, humidity, and luminosity sensor for use in the greenhouse, or water temperature, pH, DO sensor for use in a fish farm. In our demo test, we use two sensor node as described in the Fig. 3 (Node01) and Fig.4 (Node02)
Node 01 has Adafuit TSL2561 and BMP 180 which can measure luminosity and barometric respectively.
Fig. 3 - Node 01
Node 02 has a DHT22 sensor which can measure temperature and humidity.
Fig. 4 - Node 02