A green house study of a capacitive soil moisture sensor for loamy clay soil

Abstract

This project was developed to overcome the problems related to the environment. For examples, due to the increasing number of population, a lot of problems have been found. The biggest issue is about the changes of climates. The un-stabilize of climates caused a lot of phenomenon such as global warming. Due to this phenomena, the quantity of water in the stream becomes lower. In order to help the society, project of soil moisture sensor is proposed. This project is proposed to detect the water content of a soil. The main brain of the system in this project is the microcontroller. The sensor connected to the microcontroller is called as a soil moisture sensor. This kind of sensor is based on capacitance. The higher the content of water in the soil, the higher the capacitance of a capacitive sensor, cause the frequency of the soil moisture to be lower. Furthermore, the principal of capacitance sensor is used to calculate the frequency of a 555 timer IC. Soil content with water has a dielectric content. The dielectric is formed between the two plates of capacitor called as parallel plate. The smaller the separation between the plate, the higher the value of the capacitance. The information received from the sensor will be analyzed by the microcontroller, to identify the content of water in the soil. The frequency value of water content is displayed on the LCD screen in a form of percentage value. The percentage of a soil moisture will show to us the condition of the surrounding temperature.