Real-time monitoring system for paddy environmental information based on DC powerline communication technology

- Approach to monitor paddy environmental information using DC PLC technology.
- Communication nodes up to 500 slave nodes on the BUS.
- With a communication distance up to 3000 m.
- Supporting any network: Tree, star, BUS.
- Free design in isolation or non-isolation and low cost solution.

In view of the characteristics of a long monitoring period, great environmental interference, slow acquisition speed and lack of automated management in the process of farmland environmental data collection, an innovative approach to monitor paddy environmental information based on DC powerline communication technology was proposed. It analyzes in detail the composition structure. Circuit schematics are designed, and working principles are elaborated; a system program and PC monitoring software are also designed. The system was composed of slave nodes; a master node to collect data from the slave nodes; one server installed on a PC to retrieve, store and present the data; and monitoring software that can present the data via a browser. A communication protocol is adopted to collect data form more slave nodes, and WebSocket and vector markup language (VML) are applied for monitoring software design. Communication distance experimental results indicated that the communication distance can be extended to 3000 m with power of 36 V DC. The accuracy and loss rate experimental results showed that all nodes' accuracy is higher than 98%. The system test results showed that the average relative errors of air temperature, air humidity and soil moisture are 0.39%, 0.31% and 0.64%, respectively.