International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 7(8) 2020, Pages: 117-124 Contents lists available at Science-Gate International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences Journal homepage: http://www.science-gate.com/IJAAS.html IoT based smart garden monitoring system using NodeMCU microcontroller Mubashir Ali 1, *, Nosheen Kanwal 2, Aamir Hussain 3, Fouzia Samiullah 1, Aqsa Iftikhar 4, Mehreen Qamar 4 1Department of Software Engineering, Lahore Garrison University, Lahore, Pakistan 2Department of Computer Science, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan 3Department of Computer Science, Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan, Pakistan 4Department of Computer Science, Lahore Garrison University, Lahore, Pakistan ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Technology brings a remarkable advancement in every field of life, whether Received 18 January 2020 its industry or agriculture. Our lives are essentially dependent on agricultural Received in revised form development. Researchers are working to integrate modern technologies in 2 May 2020 agriculture to develop new practices for the enhancement of healthy Accepted 6 May 2020 agriculture and production. Internet of things is a domain of computer science that provides mechanisms and techniques to interconnect a wide Keywords: range of digital devices to automate the real-life systems. In big cities, Smart garden peoples facing problems in their homegrown gardens regarding the NodeMCU maintenance and availability of proper gardeners. This research paper has Internet of things (IoT) proposed an IoT based approach for smart garden monitoring using Sensors NodeMCU microcontroller that helps the users in identifying current Mobile computing parameters of temperature, moisture, and humidity of their homegrown plants and gardens. A prototype has been implemented to show the real illustration of the proposed approach. An android mobile application has been developed to display the real-time profiles of environmental factors like temperature, moisture, and humidity. With the help of this system, users will be able to treat their gardens in a better way in terms of plant health and growth. This research work replaces the need for gardeners and issues faced during the maintenance of gardens in big cities. The purpose of this research is to introduce and prosper the IoT innovation towards smart cities in our society. © 2020 The Authors. Published by IASE. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). 1. Introduction automation of specific tasks. Data exchange is the key factor for IoT. The standards of our lives will be *In the current technological era, automation rules nourished by the practice of using automation for all over the world and holds the key to radically simple things (Albishi et al., 2017). We are living in empowering several sectors of Pakistan’s economy. the fourth industrial revolution in which systems are From manufacturing, agriculture to services and moving from manual to automatic process (Trotta logistics, technology can enhance the capacities, and Garengo, 2018). It brings the concept of the efficiencies, and production quality of every human smart industry and opens many research directions activity (Yeo et al., 2014). Internet of things is a (Zhou et al., 2015). Those Peoples who prefer to technique of using computers, mobile phones, or grow gardens and other small fruit plants in their digital devices in monitoring and controlling the homes often get cautious during the early stages of simple parameters of day to day life (Dorsemaine et maintenance. As a result, the garden gets destroyed al., 2015). Using IoT concepts and knowledge, new due to a lack of care. There are also weather systems will be developed based upon sensors, conditions that can render the gardens lifetime software, and communication protocols for short, as some crops/plants can die due to lack of moisture, severe heat, and humidity, etc. (Biswal et al., 2015). People hire the gardeners to maintain * Corresponding Author. Email Address: [email protected] (M. Ali) their homegrown small gardens. Most plants often https://doi.org/10.21833/ijaas.2020.08.012 get damaged due to environmental conditions and Corresponding author's ORCID profile: lack of proper care. This is where the idea of an https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9430-9919 automated garden monitoring system takes place 2313-626X/© 2020 The Authors. Published by IASE. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license with the internet of things to overcome above- (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) 117 Ali et al/International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 7(8) 2020, Pages: 117-124 mentioned problems. The proposed system computing and embedded system development. integrates all sensors and components for real-time However, these approaches cannot address the statistics. Communication is done with wireless challenges of IoT based systems. Kumar et al. (2016) sensor networks. Mobile computing is an efficient have introduced an integrated methodology to tackle technology to support the internet of things for the challenges of IoT. Zhou et al. (2017) highlighted developing real-life systems (Kavitha et al., 2020). the current IoT concerns and issues very precisely. Already, there are mobile applications that help Guinard et al. (2011) briefed the concept of the web farmers in their crop maintenance. Similar IoT based of Things and their implication in real-life systems. systems are designed for garden maintenance that is The Internet of things completes the dream of costly and often used one task, only temperature connecting the physical things with the virtual reading or water pouring mechanism. Our country is world, which can be remotely controlled and based upon the agriculture sector, and it needs to managed. Atlam et al. (2017) emphasized the cloud achieve higher benefits from agriculture like India things architecture that integrates cloud computing (Khan and Khan, 2018). Thamaraimanalan et al. and the internet of things. Khan and Salah (2018) (2018) have proposed a system that analyzes the have technically reviewed and categorized the environmental parameters of the garden to security issues of IoT by mapping those issues on automate the watering process of plants. A mobile three-layer architecture. Furthermore, security application is developed to check the status of the requirements for IoT Systems are highlighted, and garden for watering. This system senses the the state of the art solution is presented. temperature and moisture with temperature and The paper is divided into five sections, and every moisture sensors for big gardens. Soil and other section elaborates on the aspect of this research. supporting sensors are integrated over Arduino that Section 2 discusses the proposed system design, gathers the values of soil and transfer the along with hardware and software development. information to firebase by using built-in WIFI Section 3 shows the implementation of the proposed facility. Suma et al. (2017) presented a watering garden monitoring system with hardware system for gardens according to six seasonal components, software, tools, and communication environmental factors of their country. The protocols. Section 4 discusses the experimental temperature sensor, humidity sensor, and pump results with sufficient details and supporting figures. controller are integrated to develop the prototype. Lastly, section 5 concludes the research and briefs The system senses the moisture and humidity level the future direction. of plants and provides water accordingly. Another home garden watering system based upon single- 2. Proposed system design board raspberry pi computer is developed by Ishak et al. (2017). This system is highly efficient in terms We use NodeMCU (ESP 8266) microcontroller to of hardware, development, and implementation cost. integrate the entire module where sensors are IR sensor, soil moisture sensor, ultrasonic sensor, connected to it, and data is transferred via a Wi-Fi LDR, and the gas sensor is integrated over raspberry module that is available in the microcontroller. The pi. This system senses the environmental factors and device is portable and requires charging after some alerts with proper time to feed the plants. A time. The data is transferred directly to the theoretical model of intelligent garden monitoring is application. Fig. 1 proposed system diagram is a presented by Biswal et al. (2015) to help the pictorial representation which shows how every developers and researchers to build intelligent component plays a certain role in it. In this diagram, systems. Another implementation for remote the device is depicted in the center with various monitoring of environmental soil properties is components. The network part is an access point presented by Na et al. (2016). allotted for operating the device. Internet of things is the future of current Temperature sensors are used to detect the technology, and there will be 20 billion-plus digital current status of heat and soil of air that can be devices interconnected over the internet in 2020. useful for analyzing the heat effect on garden plants. Internet of things bringing a revolution in our lives Similarly, the YL-69 sensor displays the current by providing automatic solutions of manufacturing moisture levels of soil and humidity sensor detect (Paracha et al., 2020) to monitoring systems (Ali and the percentage of water