Optimized Nursery for Indoor Onion Nourishment (ONION)

Abstract

An Optimized Nursery for Indoor Onion Nourishment (ONION) was designed as an automated smart hydroponic greenhouse that is capable of monitoring, assisting and controlling optimal safe environment parameters for culturing white inions. It addresses the problem of infestation, direct and inevitable climate change, lack of assistance and human error which are known to be causes of the low production yields. The system considers four important parameters, which are very essential to the growth of white onions, namely pH level, ambient temperature, humidity and internal light intensity. Microcontroller-based actuators are used to maintain optimal and safe environment that triggers the cooling system (fan), solenoid valves, and LED strips (light). The greenhouse environmental parameters are continuously monitored and the sensor data are logged online. A GSM module was also added to enable to system to send SMS messages to the user whenever the four parameters deviate from their safe values. During critical states, the actuators can be controlled by the user through the online monitoring program or thru SMS control messages. During experimentation and testing, the system was proven to be very efficient and functional which is ideal in optimizing and maintaining high growth rate of white onions.