DEVELOPING A LOGGING UNIT FOR MEASURING AND RECORDING POWER DATA USING ARDUINO BOARD

Abstract

A logging unit for measuring and recording power data for tillage implements was investigated. The system of sensor for a continuous and real time measurement of draft data is a set of electronic circuit made around the Arduino UNO board. It consisted of a conditioning circuit for strain gauges pull meter. The developed system was an alternative of the commercial data logger namely Daytronic system 10K4 in draft measurement system (Khadr, 2008). As with the hardware, the Arduino integrated development environment is open source and can be down-loaded freely from the project's internet website for programming, serves for compiling and up-loading programs to the microcontroller. Laboratory evaluation demonstrated that the developed system has been successfully gathered data from strain gauge pull meter. The entire system was fixed on a tractor and a field experiment with chisel plow was conducted to evaluate the performance of the developed instrumentation system by determining the required chisel plow draft. The plowing speed measurement was done manually. The drawbar pull was measured at three tractor plowing speeds. The draft results were compared with those obtained through ASAE (2000) equation for chisel plow and the relative error was about 27%. The very limited cost of the system presented in this paper could represent a step towards a more widespread application of accurate monitoring of tillage and tractor performance data potential, leading to an improvement of farm machinery management.