II. THE GREENHOUSE ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING
SYSTEM DESIGN
Traditional agriculture only use machinery and equipment which isolating and no communicating ability. And farmers have to monitor crops’ growth by themselves. Even if some people use electrical devices, but most of them were restricted to simple communication between control computer and end devices like sensors instead of wire connection, which couldn’t be strictly defined as wireless sensor network. Therefore, by through using sensor networks and, agriculture could become more automation, more networking and smarter.
In this project, we should deploy five kinds of sensors in the greenhouse basement. By through these deployed sensors, the parameters such as temperature in the greenhouse, soil temperature, dew point, humidity and light intensity can be detected real time. It is key to collect different parameters from all kinds of sensors. And in the greenhouse, monitoring the vegetables growing conditions is the top issue.
Therefore, longer battery life and lower data rate and less complexity are very important. From the introduction about above, we know that meet the requirements for reliability, security, low costs and low power.
The overview of Greenhouse environmental monitoring system, which is made up by one sink node (coordinator), many sensor nodes, workstation and database. Mote node and sensor node together composed of each collecting node. When sensors collect parameters real time, such as temperature in the greenhouse, soil temperature, dew point, humidity and light intensity, these data will be offered to A/D converter, then by through quantizing and encoding become the digital signal that is able to transmit by wireless sensor communicating node. Each wireless sensor communicating node has ability of transmitting, receiving function.
In this WSN, sensor nodes deployed in the greenhouse, which can collect real time data and transmit data to sink node (Coordinator) by the way of multi-hop. Sink node complete the task of data analysis and data storage. Meanwhile, sink node is connected with GPRS/CDMA can provide remote control and data download service. In the monitoring and controlling room, by running greenhouse management software, the sink node can periodically receives the data from the wireless sensor nodes and displays them on monitors.
B. Node Hardware Design
Sensor nodes are the basic units of WSN. The hardware platform is made up sensor nodes closely related to the specific application requirements. Therefore, the most important work is the nodes design which can perfect implement the function of detecting and transmission as a WSN node, and perform its technology characteristics. Fig.4 shows the universal structure of the WSN nodes. Power module provides the necessary energy for the sensor nodes. Data collection module is used to receive and convert signals of sensors. Data processing and control module’s functions are node device control, task scheduling, and energy computing and so on. Communication module is used to send data between nodes and frequency chosen and so on.
In the data transfer unit, the module is embedded to match the MAC layer and the NET layer of the protocol. We choose CC2430 as the protocol chips, which integrated the CPU, RF transceiver, net protocol and the RAM together. CC2430 uses an 8 bit MCU (8051), and has 128KB programmable flash memory and 8KB RAM. It also includes A/D converter, some Timers, AES128 Coprocessor, Watchdog Timer, 32K crystal Sleep mode Timer, Power on Reset, Brown out Detection and 21 I/Os. Based on the chips, many modules for the protocol are provided. And the transfer unit could be easily designed based on the modules.
As an example of a sensor end device integrated temperature, humidity and light, the design is shown in Fig. 5.
The SHT11 is a single chip relative humidity and temperature multi sensor module comprising a calibrated digital output. It can test the soil temperature and humidity. The DS18B20 is a digital temperature sensor, which has 3 pins and data pin can link MSP430 directly. It can detect temperature in greenhouse. The TCS320 is a digital light sensor. SHT11, DS18B20 and TCS320 are both digital sensors with small size and low power consumption. Other sensor nodes can be obtained by changing the sensors. ZigBee无线传感器网络英文文献和中文翻译(2):http://www.youerw.com/fanyi/lunwen_31155.html