Soil Moisture Monitoring System Using LoRaWAN Technology

Abstract: An IoT device measuring soil moisture to help a municipality improve the work surrounding irrigation is deployed for testing and used by the concerned municipal workers. The IoT device is an initial prototype using Pycom’s LoPy4 with expansion board 3.1 and 3xAAA batteries as power supply. The prototype is not suitable for larger-scale testing due to the size, cost, and power consumption. This thesis focuses on decreasing the cost and size while increasing the battery life for the IoT device.The IoT device is communicating using the LoRaWAN protocol. For the device to be as energy-efficient as possible, the LoRa and LoRaWAN protocol are explored to use all possibilities to save energy. Active time and power consumption between different spreading factors are examined and discussed for power consumption and range concerns. The prototype produced by the work performed in this thesis is used to measure soil moisture. The microcontrollers selected and tested will not restrict to that purpose. The microcontrollers can integrate with many kinds of sensors. Integration with other types of sensors is under future work in this thesis. The integration possibilities making the thesis relevant for anyone with an intermediate knowledge inprogramming wanting to get introduced into the IoT development cycle, develop aLoRa node, and learning how to use the LoRaWAN stack with MicroPython.