A Prototype Study for Remote Monitoring of Greenhouse Variables

Abstract

Greenhouses are industrial factories where crops are grown, particularly cultivated plants, by attempting to replicate natural production conditions outside of their natural growing seasons. In greenhouse production, it is crucial to accurately mimic the natural growing environment while achieving high-quality, high-yield production at low cost, ensuring the environment does not cause plant diseases, and protecting both the environment and plants from unpredictable weather conditions. Therefore, monitoring and controlling the input variables of the greenhouse, which are designed to simulate natural production conditions, is very important. In this study, a system was developed that measures the inputs of a greenhouse—internal and external temperatures, humidity, pressure, soil moisture, light, and CO2 levels—using appropriate sensors. This system allows for remote monitoring and control in off-grid environments without internet infrastructure, using an IoT development board and LoRa technology. Through this system, the greenhouse inputs are maintained within the required values ​​according to the plant's production characteristics, and remote monitoring is ensured. When the sampling time for data exchange between 13 sensor nodes was reduced to below 2 seconds, missing data transmissions were detected due to the size of the data packet. However, literature studies have shown that such short data change intervals are not necessary to monitor, and periods of 1 minute or more are generally used. As a result of this study, sensor data measured at the created sensor nodes were successfully and error-free transferred to another node approximately 4 km away using radio frequencies with LoRa transceivers. Remote monitoring was also performed via the internet infrastructure using IoT. However, the study achieved its main objective: remote monitoring in off-grid environments without internet infrastructure using LoRa radio transceivers. This provides a significant contribution, unlike similar studies in the literature, by not only using internet infrastructure but also performing off-grid remote monitoring with LoRa transceivers.