Reducing water usage for the “Altes Land” with accurate, real-time temperature readings
Farmers on the “Altes Land” have been struggling for years during the winter seasons. Harvests have been progressively getting worse, due to the temperature levels being low at unpredictable moments. Because of this unpredictability, farmers resort to the solution of frost irrigation, which in theory works perfectly fine. However this method is being used on every single crop on their land, which;
a) does not have to be done on every crop, as temperature levels vary significantly between different areas of the land,
b) partially affects the harvest itself, due to possible over watering from that procedure,
c) overall, negatively impacts the climate, given the high water consumption.
As part of the Bili-Hackathon 2024, we, team yoloswaggerReverb, have made it our goal, to provide a long-lasting and simple solution to this everlasting problem.
Defining the problem
To provide an overall good and practical solution, we first had to properly define the problem of this specific situation; what is the issue? Are there any factors to look at hand for this issue? Who’s affected by that issue? Etc.
We have diagnosed the problem as “High water consumption during cold seasons“, which essentially also includes the sub-problems mentioned before like bad harvests. Affected by this problem are the farmers from the “Altes Land“, however due to the sub-problems, other parties are also affected, say the consumers of said harvest. An important factor to keep in mind, is that over the years, the climate has gotten harder and harder do manage for farmers, as well as the inaccuracy of weather forecasts at times. The solution we want to provide therefore needs to be as accurate as possible, determining the current temperature, so that farmers may be able to adapt their harvest to the concurrent climate.
Providing the solution
Our idea provides a standardized, easy and long-lasting solution. With a temperature sensor attached to a microcontroller (referred to as node from now on), corresponding data will be read and through an Ad-Hoc-based network system those real-time temperature readings will be transferred across multiple other nodes, finally persisting said data through a database. Other than real-time temperature readings, additional data will be gathered across all nodes to ensure fully-working network system. Gathered data of all nodes will be shown through a web page, where the farmer gets real-time information about all nodes across his acre, such as temperature, position, status and battery percentage. This ensures that frost irrigation is only applied where and when it is truly necessary, to not only reduce the water consumption, but also increase the quality of their harvest.
To provide this solution with utmost care and functionality, we partnered up with Boskoopbase, who took on the task to provide us the functional nodes and sensors to gather data, whereas we worked on the actual persistence of the data and visualisation of those.
The following hardware was used to accomplish said solution:
ESP8266 – Microcontroller
DS18B20 – Temperature-sensor