Abstract:
In Uganda, as well as other developing countries, the increasing. population stimulates the agricultural-related activities such as irrigation. Irrigation is basically done by humans and generally requires exhaustive physical efforts and involves exposure to errors during irrigation. Despite the advances in the irrigation and its wide spreading applications, irrigation remains majorly manual. Since irrigating is a difficult process especially when irrigating a big piece of land, it is necessary to simplify the process, thus web based system in irrigating was introduced and existing implementations have limitations such as irrigating at wrong hours, continued wastage of water, so prevent all this, a new system that uses web control to remotely irrigate from a distance has- been developed, therefore main aim of this project is to design and develop a web based irrigation monitoring and control system since it is observed that this method is more reliable and efficient compared to the existing methods. The developed system is able to automatically receive the moisture levels from the field, responds to the different commands sent by the user to do the irrigation and the user is also able to switch on and off the pump. Microcontroller is used to control the function of switching on and off the pump controlling the rate at which water is supplied to the field, the Ethernet shield causes the. system to act as a client that keeps pushing readings from the moisture sensor- to the database over to the machine where WAMP is installed and the web can be accessed using a router which creates a LAN for the network.
The moisture to be maintained within the field depends on. the type of son, type of the crops this is because it was found out that different types of soils requires a given amount of water and- also different types of crops also requires a quantity of water for irrigation and moisture content is dependent on the user requirement. It was thus observed that the moisture plays an important role in the growth of crops like rice hence moisture is paramount. The system is more economical and is a user friendly system since the system can applied on any piece of land hence it's a viable system.
