The Carousel Irrigation System at the Southern Arava R&D is an agricultural research system used to measure the effects of different water salinities on plants.
The system is divided into three main components:
- Hardware
- Database
- User-interface
This project is meant to create a supplementary automatic irrigation system to the existing carousel, using the spinning capabilities it already has. For this project we will be using a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian as the operating system. The hardware components required are the following:
1 Raspberry pi 4 (https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/) 2 Electronic ball valves (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XRJF4JG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) 2 Flow rate sensors (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VKAT9VA/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) 1 L298N motor driver (https://cdn.instructables.com/ORIG/FCN/YABW/IHNTEND4/FCNYABWIHNTEND4.pdf) 1 RFID scanner (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076HSDF2Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) 24 RFID tags (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076HSDF2Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
Aside from that, a soldering board extension and a soldering iron is recommended for organization
The wiring of the system can be seen in the pictures below:
Refer to the fritzing files for more detailed information
The database used for this project is a MySql database running locally on the Raspberry Pi, which makes access to it very simple, this database is only running when the Raspberry Pi is turned on.
The user-interface was created using python, the GTK library, which is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces, and Glade for the design.
A user manual was created for operating the system
