FPGA-based real-time remote monitoring system

Real-time monitoring provides reliable, timely information of crop and soil status, important in taking decisions for crop production improvement. The contribution of this research is the development of a real-time remote monitoring system that acquires data from any kind of sensor to be transmitted by radiofrequency to a computer with an interface module, situated within a 900 m radius. This allows the sensing of large area fields with a system capable of monitoring crop local environmental or physiological status; the data transmission and storage in the computer is made in real-time. To design this device, the system on a chip approach was followed. Implementation was done in a field programmable gate array, which ensures a low cost. The performance of this system was tested using different kinds of sensors and compared with various commercial monitoring systems under greenhouse conditions. The experimental results showed the system to be reliable. For all experiments, the system obtained an R2 greater than or equal 0.975 in a regression analysis between data acquired from our monitoring system and data obtained from a commercial datalogger with linear fit and second-degree polynomial fit.