Smart Greenhouse over LoRa in HKT
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Greenhouses are climate-controlled structures with walls and roofs specially designed for the off-season growing of plants.
Inadequate food supply due to high population growth is a global threat, and this threat is felt most especially in Africa. Food production by conventional means is not sufficient. Therefore, agricultural production in a greenhouse with highly controlled environmental conditions is expected that the production contributes to a stable supply of agricultural commodities regardless of the weather. Most modern sawtooth greenhouses are equipped with motors on all sides to control the sidewalls plastics that regulate the ventilation and internal heat. The shading mechanism is also supported in the summer due to the direct sunlight. Recirculating fans are widely used in the modern greenhouse as well to ensure ventilation, which prevents scorching, decreases the risk of pests and diseases of the plants. All of these features ensure that the climate inside the greenhouse remains at the optimal level for the maximum yield. In this case study, with the help of the agriculture starter kit, Milesight addresses the challenges of environmental monitoring and system automation inside of sawtooth greenhouses and fully utilizes that data to improve operations and drive overall business success.
LoRaWAN Based for Smart Greenhouse Monitoring Systems
Challenges & Requirements
Greenhouses are climate-controlled structures with walls and roofs specially designed for the off-season growing of plants.


Manual operation system

The ventilation system composed of motors and fans lacks automation, which can cause discomfort to the workers as they are bound to visit the greenhouse every day and manually control them.

Manual data collection

A lot of problems can occur as it affects the production rate because the temperature and humidity must be constantly monitored to ensure the good yield of the plants. Besides, it’s difficult to make some sort of data logging for further research.

Increased manpower expenses

Operating greenhouses on such a large scale requires tremendous amounts of manpower. This leads to a decrease in efficiency as the process becomes highly laborious and expensive.

Risk of contamination

The new solution must be non-invasive i.e. wireless so as to maintain the ongoing greenhouse in production.

Automating mechanism

The environmental monitoring and the ventilation system are working independently. Thus, in the new solution client wants to realize the automatic control of the motors and fans according to the exact climate parameters.

Considering automation, less maintenance, wireless deployment, bidirectional communication, the LoRaWAN® based solution from HKT has been submitted by Link Valleys Ltd, which meets all the above needs and more.

Data Management


For the installation process, not many tools were required. The gateway and the sensors were set up prior to the installation date to ensure that everything works as well as to be more efficient.

Upon confirmation of the order, with the help of Greenworld, the sensors were installed at the appropriate places in the greenhouse to ensure that the data was as accurate as possible and to avoid any false values that might occur.

Regular updates can be viewed from a cloud application or mobile app (HKT IoT Cloud), and controllers can be directly activated over the internet with the click of a button on the dashboard. This is done with the aid of the HKT IoT Cloud application.


HKT cloud makes it easy to make graphs which are very useful in terms of comparison of data. For example, for the soil sensor, if the electronic conductivity starts to drop below 1500, this means that the irrigation has a problem. There might be a small power cut that might reset the current program of the irrigation or a blown fuse of the pump that might have caused this problem.

Until now, the client is mostly satisfied with the system. Having the ability to realize the environmental monitoring on the phone is a major advantage in terms of knowing the plant health using the soil sensor which provides critical information on the root health and in terms of diagnostic of problems.


Benefits


The result of this project is an easier and more efficient means of managing plant growth and a means of enhancing food production. With the aid of the LoRaWAN® solution, anyone can access a high yield of farming and therefore be self-sustainable in the aspect of food production.

Non-invasive solution

A farm with greenhouses located on a large property, where the LoRaWAN® solution would be perfect for its big range covering and data sharing in the same environmental monitoring network.

High flexibility and low maintenance

The battery-powered sensors have done away with a lot of the repetitive work with high accuracy, and they can be added or moved anytime anywhere with no worries about cable and electricity.

Minimum human interference

The plants are kept at optimum temperature, humidity, light, and soil moisture levels with little or no input from the user, which reduced the amount of labor in the farm.