The Design of Soil Temperature and Humidity Monitoring Systems with IoT-Based LoRa Technology

Abstract

Soil temperature and humidity are important factors in affecting the condition of agricultural sector, which has an impact on the quality and quantity of the production. Lack of information on the condition of agricultural soil is one of the causes in productivity deficiency in the process of agricultural cultivation. The application of technology in the field of agriculture is expected to be able to reduce various adverse effects of agricultural soil conditions. One of which is by periodic monitoring, such as the temperature and humidity of agricultural soil. This research aims to design LoRa technology to be used as a data transmission medium for monitoring soil temperature and humidity by applying a system that is based on the Blynk application, which will make the users easier to monitor the system remotely. The temperature sensor was able to acquire data with 98.37% accuracy and the soil humidity sensor was able to acquire data with 91.63% accuracy. The changes in LoRa transmission parameters for monitoring data have an effect on the quality of its performance. The experimental results with Bandwidth variation (BW) from 31.25 kHz, 62.50 kHz, 125 kHz, 250 kHz, and 500 kHz at a distance of 15m, the best SNR and RSSI values were obtained for BW 31.25 kHz with values of 5.42 dB and -104.90 dBm. Whereas, the best ToA is obtained with a BW of 500 kHz with a value of 27.50 ms. While, the experimental result with the variation of Coding Rate (CR) from CR 4/5, 4/6, 4/7, and 4/8 at a distance of 15m, the best SNR and RSSI values were obtained CR 4/8 with values of 4.10 dB and -106.40 dBm and he best ToA was obtained CR 4/5 with a value of 112.70 ms. In testing by using variation Spreading Factor (SF) from SF7, SF9, and SF12, the higher the SF value used, the wider the range of area data communication will be. Configuration SF7 and SF9 were only able to reach a distance of 25m, while SF12 was able to reach a distance of 35m.