2010 International Conference on Measuring Technology and Mechatronics Automation

Wireless Measurement and Control System for Environmental

Parameters in Greenhouse

Yang Shulian, Zhang Yu

Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, Shandong, 255049, China
yangsl21cn@163.com

Abstract – According to the environmental parameters

monitoring requirements in greenhouse, a wireless
measurement and control system for temperature and humidity
is developed. It overcomes the disadvantages of wired
monitoring system, such as complicated wiring, and difficult
maintenance. The environmental parameters in every
greenhouse were measured and controlled by microcontroller.
The hardware and software of the monitoring system are
discussed in detail. The experimental results show that the
developed monitoring system has the following features, such as
simple structure, high reliability, good extensibility and flexible
configuration. It can control and adjust automatically the
environmental parameters in every greenhouse, and has project
practicality and vendibility.
Keywords –Greenhouse; temperature and humidity; Wireless
transmitting and receiving; measurement and control; nRF905
takes charge of collecting temperature, humility, carbon
dioxide and other parameters, and transmit these parameters
to centralized control unit by wireless sending modules; on
the other hand, it takes charge of carrying out the instructions
sending by PC and then to adjust these parameters.
Centralized control unit not only summarizes the data
collecting by every terminal and transmits these parameters
to PC, but also receives control instructions from PC and also
sends it to every terminal to adjust the environment
parameters of every terminal. The PC collects the
environment parameters of every terminal, handles and
displays it, which gives all kinds of control instruction
according to these parameters. Serial communication circuit
achieves the level conversion between the microcontroller
and the PC in order to realize the communication between
them.

I. INTRODUCTION
For the large rural distract, the greenhouse production Terminal 1
Terminal n
has become a way of being rich. The growth of crop in Terminal 2
greenhouse depends on temperature, humility and other
parameters in greenhouse. So it is important to real-timely
and properly measure and adjust the temperature, humility .
PC RS232C Centralized control unit
and other parameters in the greenhouse. With the continued .
expansion of production scale, the disadvantages of .
traditional wire monitoring system are more and more
prominent, such as complicated arrangement, difficult Terminal 3 Terminal 4
maintenance and so on. Then the wireless monitoring system
is developed, which based on wireless communication
technology, does not need cables, adds or reduces Figure 1. Block diagram of general system.
configuration at random, possess simple system construction.
Moreover, it is characterized by its low power consumption, III. DESIGN OF FUNCTION MODULE
simple net construction. Therefore, it proves to be simple and
of practical significance[1-3]. A. Centralized control unit
A greenhouse environment parameters monitoring
Centralized control unit consists of microcontroller and
system based on wireless communication technology has
radio frequency transceivers. Microcontroller as the control
been developed, which realizes the measurement, summary
center, not only controls the transmission and receiving of
and control of temperature, humility and the other
radio frequency signal; but also communicates with the PC.
parameters.
Considering energy-saving of the entire system, the
II. GENERAL SYSTEM microcontroller of STC12LE5410AD is selected which is
driven by power supply of 3.2V. It consists of the following
The diagram of monitoring system for environment
features: 8051 core, 8 channels and 10 bits ADC, 4 channels
parameters in greenhouse is shown in figure 1. It includes
PWM output, 521 Bytes of on board RAM, 10K program
every terminal, centralized control unit, PC and serial
memory, watchdog, integrated special reset circuit of
communication circuits. On the one hand, every terminal

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 MAX810, two 16 bits timers/counters, 2 channels interrupt,
full duplex UART, can be set as single clock machine cycle
(1T), and is 8 to12 times than the 51 family microcontroller in
speed.
According to the systemic design principle in high
stabilization and low power consumption, the nRF905 is
practically selected. It is a single chip radio transceiver for the
433/868/915MHz ISM band. The transceiver consists of a
fully integrated frequency synthesizer, receiver chain with
demodulator, a power amplifier, a crystal oscillator and, a
modulator. The ShockBurst™ feature automatically handles
preamble and CRC. You can easily configure the nRF905
through the SPI. Current consumption is very low, in transmit
only 9mA at an output power of -10dBm, and in receive mode
12.5mA. Built-in power down modes makes power saving
easily realizable.
With the increase of the number of greenhouse, and
being greater the area of its cover, the transmission power of
nRF905 does not meet the actual demand, thus the circuit of
amplifying power based on the chip of PA2423L is designed
to improve systemic output power and realize further
receiving and transmission distance.
B. Measurement and control unit
The block diagram of every measurement and control
terminal is showed in figure 2. It mainly includes data
acquisition subsystems, control subsystems, wireless
communication subsystems and power supply subsystem. It
is mainly used to measure the temperature and humility
indoors and outdoors and carbon dioxide concentration
indoors, to control heaters, exhaust fans, humidifiers and
transmit these data.
The microcontroller and radio frequency transceivers in
this section are selected as same as in the section A. The
measurement and control module of environment parameters
is only explained as follows.
transceiver
microcontroller
Temperature,
ADC
humidity and
CO2 sensors Heater,
humidifier
and exhaust
fan
Figure 2. Diagram of measurement and control unit.
The sensor is chosen in practical application in energy
consumption, measuring range and precision, cost and
volume, with the performance are shown as follows:
(1)Temperature and humidity sensor is chosen as
SHT15. its performance index are: temperature measuring
range is -40℃～+123.8℃, the measuring precision is ±0.3℃
at 25 ℃ , response time is less than 8 s, average power
consumption is 20 µW; humidity measuring range is
1100
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0%~100% RH, precision is ±2.0% RH; repeatability
precision is ±0.1% RH; the output is digital signal.
(2)The concentration sensor of CO2 is chosen as infrared
CO2 sensor of C20 which produced by the British GSS
Company. It’s main performance index are: measuring range
is 0~5000ppm; precision is 10ppm; response time is less than
4s; power supply is 3.3V DC; average power consumption is
less than 100mW; serial input and output are in TTL level or
analog voltage of 0~5V.
The controlling members of greenhouse for
environment parameters consist of the controlling of heater,
exhaust fan and humidifier. With the temperature, humidity
and co2 concentration are not suitable for the growth of crops,
the PC can send out instructions to control solid state relay,
then the heater, exhaust fan and humidifier are turned on by
solid state relay; Otherwise these controllers are turned out .
C. Power supply unit
The power supply consist of a lithium battery with
capacity of 1200 mAh, intelligent battery monitoring IC of
DS2762, battery protection IC of R5426, battery charge
management IC of BQ2057, etc. It provides the necessary
energy and intelligent charging and short circuit protection
function for every terminal[4].
D. Serial communication circuit unit
The serial communication circuit accomplishes the
communication between the PC and microcontroller. The
system on the one hand collects the data which every terminal
collected; on the other hand controls the action of ach
terminal by the instruction of the PC. The connection diagram
of serial interface is showed in Figure 3. This serial
communication circuit is designed based on RS232C serial
interface for data transmission. The conversion between
RS232 and TTL level by STC3232, because it is RS232C
duplex transmitter/receiver interface chip, which has level
multiplication circuit with spontaneously stepping up and
only needs a single power supply of +3.3V[5,6].
TXD
TXD RXD
STC3232
μC
PC
RXD TXD
Figure 3. Diagram of the connection of serial interface.
IV. SYSTEMIC SOFTWARE
The systemic software includes data acquisition, data
receiving and transmission by wireless and action
subprogram of every terminal, communication subprogram
between PC and microcontroller, and data processing
subprogram by PC. The program of microcontroller and PC
are coded by C51 and Visual Basic Language, respectively.
 The PC program consists of parameter setting Start
subprogram, data collection subprogram, data processing
subprogram, data management subprogram and control
instruction subprogram. Parameter setting subprogram μC initiation
mainly set all kinds of systemic parameters, such as the
working mode parameters of every terminal and the sampling Opening series interface
time. The data acquisition module achieves synchronously
the collection of multi-channel data, real-time display of
waveform, etc. Every monitoring parameter is displayed Sending instructions of acquisition data
dynamically by real-time graph and table. The data
processing module is mainly used to deal with the received Receiving terminal data
data package, such as digital filtering, numerical calculation,
scale conversion, logical judgment and so on. The data
management module is mainly used to manage the collecting Uploading data to PC
data, including storage, enquiry, printing, data analysis and
statistics, etc. The relational database of SQL Server 2000 is
used to store and manage the collecting data, graph and table Figure 5. flowchart of microcontroller subprogram
are used to show historical data inquiry information of every
monitoring parameter. Every control instruction module C. Terminal subprogram
sends all kinds of instruction based on the results of the Every terminal subprogram achieves measurement of
comparison of collected data and the standard value, and it all kinds of parameters and transmission of it, and the
will control the controller of every terminal. performance of all kinds of control instructions to adjust all
A. Main program kinds of parameters. The flowchart is followed as Figure 6.
The main program of the PC achieves data receiving, Start
analysis and storage of every terminal. For the data is beyond
the range of a pre-set, the main program sends control Initialization
instructions to control electrical apparatus of every terminal
on or off. The flow chart is followed as Figure4.
Data acquisition N
Start instruction ?

Y Control instruction
System initiation
Y
Collecting kinds of data
Humidifier instruction

Ventilator instruction
Opening RS232 series interface
Heater instruction
Transmitting data
Sending data acquisition instructions

Receiving data

N
Data beyond range？

Y
Sending control instruction Figure 6. flowchart of terminal subprogram

D. Systemic testing result

Figure 4. Flowchart of main program.
The experiment is done on the system at vegetable base
Shouguang, Shandong province. The test results for the
B. Microcontroller subprogram developed system at a moment are shown in table 1.There are
5 greenhouses are located in the circumference of a radius of
The microcontroller subprogram mainly achieves the
1km, every greenhouse can collect environmental
receiving of data from every terminal and transmission of
temperature, airy humidity, concentration of CO2 indoors.
instruction from PC, it is the connective ligament of every
terminal and the PC. The flowchart is followed as Figure 5.

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 The data sampling interval of the system is of 20 minutes.
The acquisition data are sent to central control unit by every
terminal controller, and then also sent to the PC by the central
unit. The data can be stored, displayed, analyzed, inquired
and printed by the software of the PC.
TABLE 1. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS OF THE SYSTEM.

Humidity Concentration
Greenhouse No. Temperature (℃)
(RH) of CO2 (ppm)
1 22.3 47% 1300
2 23.6 50% 1356
3 25.0 48% 1387
4 24.5 53% 1428
5 24.7 51% 1454
The test results showed that the lithium cell with
capacity of 1200mAh can only remain two days every
terminal when there is not low power consumption measure.
With taking the low power consumption measure that
controlling sampling interval and adopting dormancy, a
lithium cell after charging can remains more than half of a
year for every terminal.

V. CONCLUSION
The measurement and control system for environment
parameters in greenhouse based on wireless communication
technology is developed and initially experimented. The
experimental results indicate that the system has some
features as follows: (1) It is applied to agriculture vegetable
greenhouse can commendably overcome the disadvantage of
traditional measuring and controlling system in greenhouses.
(2) It can be kept long distance, real time monitoring for
parameter of greenhouse and the information can be obtained
of greenhouse at any time. (3) It has the advantages of not
needing cables, low power consumption, cheap cost, good
robustness, flexible extension, convenient installing over the
traditional measurement and control system.
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[3] Zhu Weihua. Design of Wireless Data collection System Based on
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[4] Zhang Baohua, Li Shining, Teng Wenxing, and etc. Development and
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