Design and Implementation of Nodes Based on CC2430 for the Agricultural Information Wireless Monitoring

Xihai Zhang
Engineering College Northeast Agricultural University Harbin, China xhzhang@neau.edu.cn

Junlong Fang
Engineering College Northeast Agricultural University Harbin, China jlfang@neau.edu.cn

Xiao Yu
Engineering College Northeast Agricultural University Harbin, China neaufish@163.com

AbstractI A newly developed sensor node, which can monitor soil temperature, is designed through modular design method. The hardware of sensor node is base on a CC2430 micro-controller and DS18B20 temperature sensor. The software system includes the temperature collection, information transmission, and the communication between two nodes. The node can collect soil temperature information and then send it to upper network node. The designed node possesses compact structure, stable performance, and small volume. The effective communications distance between nodes reaches 80 m and the error ratio is approximately 1%, which meets the requirement of agricultural information collection. This study provide better hardware platform for further researching the communication protocols of wireless sensor networks. Keywords- wireless sensor networks; zigbee; sensor nodes; temperature; cc2430

I.

INTRODUCTION

Precision agriculture refers to a set of technologies that introduce the concept of local variation into the large-scale mechanization, which is essential to large fields. With the determination of soil conditions and plant development, these technologies can lower the production cost by finetuning seeding, fertilizer, and potentially increasing production [6, 11]. These can be achieved through the approach of agricultural control and management based on direct chemical, biological and environmental sensing. Sensor networks play the major role in those approaches. Wireless sensor network technologies have enabled sensor nodes to be deployed in quantity to gather environmental parameters and to detect certain events by using inexpensive microcontrollers and low-cost RF hardware. Ning Wang et al [8] present an overview of recent developments in wireless sensor technologies in the food industry. They advocate the deployment of a WSN in agriculture because of its small size, low fixed cost and simplicity of wiring [12]. In Europe, the Lofar Agro project is a study of precision agriculture that focuses on tailored management of a crop. This involves monitoring soil, crop and climate conditions in a field, generalizing the result and providing a decision support system for treatments or taking
978-1-4244-5586-7/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

differential action such as real time variation of fertilizer or pesticide application. The DSS gathers information from a weather station and the wireless network. This is employed to map out a temperature and soil humidity distribution which is used to develop an effective strategy for controlling diseases such as Phytophthora [5]. However, one of the most important problems is quantity, diversity and accuracy of information and energy conservation for sensor nodes. Recent technology advances in the SoC (System on Chip) have made it possible to have data processing, memory, digital signal processing, analog signal processing, and RF combined in a single Microprocessor Unit. This reduces power consumption as well as the size of the overall hardware platform. Therefore, the SoC-based MPU is adequate for sensor networking hardware due to the minimized size, cost, and energy consumption [7]. A newly developed smart sensor node that can monitor the soil temperature in precision agriculture is researched in detail in this paper. In order to minimize the power requirements and achieve a true wireless system both in terms of signal and power, a sensor node was designed by using a CC2430-based micro-controller. The entire system has been verified by experimental tests on full-scale scaffold monitoring. The results show that this system provides a practical method to monitor the temperature in real time and possesses the potential of reducing maintenance costs significantly. II. NODE HARDWARE

The node hardware consists of temperature sensor module, microprocessor module, digital data transmission module and energy model. This design uses the CC2430 consisted of microprocessor module and digital data transmission module, which could simply design RF circuit. The sensor module uses digital temperature sensor DS18B20. The energy model uses two cells. The hardware of node is shown in Fig.1. A. CC2430 The CC2430 is a true System-on-Chip MCU that includes both a processor core and IEEE 802.15.4 RF; the former supports the standard 8051 instructions, and the latter supports the low-frequency communication standard. It

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enables Zigbee nodes to be built with very low total bill-of material costs. The CC2430 combines the excellent performance of the leading CC2420 RF transceiver with an industry-standard, which enhances 8051 MCU, 32/64/128 KB flash memory, 8 KB RAM and many other powerful features. Therefore, the CC2430 is highly suited for systems where a high data sampling rate with low energy consumption is required in precision agriculture. This is ensured by various operating modes. Short transition times between operating modes further ensure low power consumption [14].

The communication circuit between 18B20 and CC2430 is shown in Fig. 2. The VDD is connected to external supply. The P0.0 pin of CC2430 is connected to the DQ pin of DS18B20. The 1-Wire bus requires an external pull up resistor of approximately 5k; Thus, the idle state for the 1Wire bus is high. If for any reason, a transaction needs to be suspended. III. DESIGN OF NODE SOFTWARE

Figure 1. CC2430 block diagram.

B. Soil temperature sensors The DS18B20 digital thermometer provides 9-bit to 12bit Celsius temperature measurements and has an alarm function with nonvolatile user-programmable upper and lower trigger points. The DS18B20 communicates over a 1Wire bus that by definition requires only one data line for communication with a central microprocessor. It has an operating temperature range of -55C to +125C and is accurate to 0.5C over the range of -10C to +85C. In addition, the DS18B20 can derive power directly from the data line, eliminating the need for an external power supply [1, 10, 14] . Each DS18B20 has a unique 64-bit serial code, which allows multiple DS18B20s to function on the same 1-Wire bus. Thus, it is simple to use one microprocessor to control many DS18B20s distributed over a large area. Applications that can benefit from this feature include HVAC environmental controls, temperature monitoring systems inside buildings, equipment, or machinery, and process monitoring and control systems [3, 13]. The 1-Wire bus system uses a single bus master to control one or more slave devices. The DS18B20 is always a slave. When there is only one slave on the bus, the system is referred to as a single-drop system; the system is multidrop if there are multiple slaves on the bus.

A. Soil Temperature Collection The transaction sequence for accessing the DS18B20 is as follows: Step 1. Initialization. Step 2. ROM Command (followed by any required data exchange). Step 3. DS18B20 Function Command (followed by any required data exchange). It is very important to follow above sequence every time the DS18B20 is accessed, as the DS18B20 will not respond if any steps in the sequence are missing or out of order. Exceptions to this rule are the Search ROM [F0h] and Alarm Search [ECh] commands. After issuing either of these ROM commands, the master must return to Step 1 in the sequence. During the initialization sequence the bus master transmits (TX) the reset pulse by pulling the 1-Wire bus low for a minimum of 500 s. Then the bus master releases the bus and goes into receive mode (RX).When the bus is released, the 5k pullup resistor pulls the 1-Wire bus high. When the DS18B20 detects this rising edge, it waits 15 s to 60 s and then transmits a presence pulse by pulling the 1Wire bus low for 60 s to 240 s [2, 14]. B. ZigBee-Stack ZigBee is an open specification that enables low power consumption, low cost and low data rate for short-range wireless connections between various electronic devices [9]. The ZigBee standard is built on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines the physical and MAC layers for low-rate wireless personal area networks. The physical layer supports three frequency bands with different gross data rates: 2450 MHz (250 kbps), a 915 MHz (40 kbps) and 868 MHz (20 kbps). ZigBee standardizes both the network and the application layer.

Figure 3. ZigBee system structure diagram.

Figure 2. Interface circuit between DS18B20 and CC2430.

The network layer is in charge of organizing and providing routing over a multi-hop network, specifying different network topologies: star, tree and peer to peer. The

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Application Layer provides a framework for distributed application development and communication. The system structure of ZigBee-stack is shown in Fig. 3. ZigBee-Stack operates in an OSAL operation system. The task in OSAL adds to this system by API, which could realize the multitask mechanism. The OSAL task scheduling is shown in Fig. 4. NextActiveTask ( ) is task event query function what returns the ActiveTask. When we design software, we can decide if executing to corresponding ActiveTask ( ) by the value of Active Task.

configuration data structure differs between DMA channel 0 and DMA channels 1-4. Thus the DMA controller expects the DMA configuration data structures for DMA channels 1-4 to lie in a contiguous area in memory starting at the address held in DMA1CFGH:DMA1CFGL and consisting of 32 bytes. After DMA characterization is set, DMA channel is readied by setting the bit of MAARM and RMREQ. Data is written to the TXFIFO when writing to the RFD register. Data is read from the he RXFIFO when the RFD register is read. Then, after DMA transmission, integrity of the data frame is transferred to TXFIFO. The TX transmission is started by sending command ISTXONCCA to CSP. Therefore, the transmission of a frame data is finished [4]. In received data, the system frequency is also set to 32MHz and the Rx frequency must equal to TX frequency and the DMA channel is set. The data source of DMA is RFD and the trigger signal of DMA is set to RADIO. IV. CONCLUSION

Figure 4.

OSAL task scheduling mechanism.

C. Wireless Sensor Ccommunication In this subsection we introduce the course and method of the point to point communication. The flow chart of data distribution is shown in Fig. 5. The system frequency is set to 32 MHz in system initialization phase. In RF initialization, firstly communication frequency is set and then the analog voltage regulator is disabled by setting the RF register bit RFPWR.RREG_RADIO_PD to 1.

In this paper, a wireless sensor networks node based on CC2430 is designed and implemented. The hardware circuit is shown in Fig. 6. The communication between the two nodes is introduced. The sensor node is designed through modular design and its advantage is compact structure and small volume. The node can collect soil temperature information and send it to upper network node. The effective communication distance is 80m and the error code rate is below 1% in the spacious field. The output power of nodes with PA is 23 dBm. In conclusion, the performances meet the design demands. This research can provide better hardware platform for further researching the communication protocols of wireless sensor networks.

Figure 6. Hardware circuit

ACKNOWLEDGMENT Funding for this research is provided by Heilongjiang Provincial Key University Laboratory of Cold Area Vegetable Biology (No. GS2009010), Heilongjiang Provincial Youth Science Special funds Project (No. QC2009C18) and Innovation team of Northeast Agriculture University (No. 190210). (P. R. China)
Figure 5. Flow chart of Data distribution procedures.

In DMA initialization phase, it is important to note that the method for specifying the start address for the DMA

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