Smart Indoor Vertical Farming System

Abstract

Nowadays, farming is not only the patent representing farmers or gardeners. Plant growing has already becoming a life style for keeping people a healthy mindset. In China, especially Hong Kong, compare to the shortage of agricultural resources such as farmland, the amount of indoor space is sufficient. However, in most houses in Hong Kong, planting at home is impossible because of insufficient indoor area. To solve this problem, building a farming system which can save considerable space while managing indoor farming easily would be a good way. This project is aimed to build a relatively space-efficient smart vertical indoor farming system. For farming part, a vertical hydroponic farming system is built to grow lettuce. For the electrical "smart system" part, a smart Internet-of-Things (IoT) system with sensor technology and embedded system is implemented to help the end-user monitor the growing environment of plants by looking through datas on an Android mobile application (App). In the major board, an Arduino microcontroller is connected to a temperature sensor, a liquid sensor, a light intensity sensor and a LED red/blue plant growing light. In order to monitor the real-time water temperature and state of the water pump data from temperature and liquid sensors on a smart phone, a bluetooth module is connected on Arduino to communicate and exchange data with an Android App. On the lighting part, an automated control of growing light function is implemented depending on the sufficiency of light in growing environment. Furthermore, a manual control function of growing light using mobile App is also achieved.