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CHAPTER ONE
1. INTRODUCTION
Water is the most important element in our life. It is used in gardens to water plant, in food
production etc. but in the past most gardeners use manual system to water plants in the gardens.
But now we are designing that the watering of plants is base up on the automatic motor starter.
Therefore as our title which is soil moisture content based automatic motor starter for selfirrigation purpose indicates we will use a microcontroller to control moisture content in the soil
and if it is dry, by using pumping motor water has to be pumped automatically.

1.1 BACKGROUND
As we have tried to describe in the introduction although water is used in irrigation widely, the
usage was manual. The gardeners use manual technique to water their plants in the gardens. But
this was not good because it loses labor, time and money and also it was not safe for the plant
itself. Because the water may be above the need of the plant or it may be insufficient.

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1.2 OBJECTIVE
The main objective of this project is automatically controlling the irrigation system using soil
moisture sensor in combination with microcontroller and relay. This means the moisture content
in the soil in the cultivating field is monitored by using the microcontroller and the sensor. Then
based on soil moisture pumping motor will be automatically switch on or off through relay. If the
soil is dry water will be pumped automatically, but if the soil is wet water will not be pumped to
the field.
1.3 SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
By properly design the soil moisture sensed self irrigation system can irrigate the plant
automatically by the microcontroller taking the sensor result without involvement of human
interference. It can control a huge area of garden plants.
1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROJECT

To save human power

To keep the plant health.

Equally distribute to the all-area.

To save money.

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CHAPTER TWO
WORKING PRINCIPLE AND BLOCK DIAGRAM OF THE SYSTEM
2.1 WORKING PRINCIPLE OF THE SYSTEM
The input of the microcontroller is the soil moisture sensor. This sensor senses the moisture
content in the soil; it gives its output to the micro controller as an input. The micro controller
checks the moisture content to the standard value which is programmed in it by the user. Here we
are using a soil moisture sensor to find whether the soil is dry or wet. If it is dry the water
pumping motor will pump the water. This means it becomes on using the relay which is
controlled by a microcontroller. But if the soil is wet the pumping motor will be off through the
relay.
When we say this soil moisture content sensor senses the content of the moisture in the soil and
gives the status of the soil to the microcontroller, based on that the microcontroller will display
the status of the soil on the LCD (whether it is DRY or WET) and switch on or off the pumping
motor through relay. If the soil is in dry status the LCD displays dry and the pumping motor will
pump the water into the field until the soil is wet which is continuously monitored by the
microcontroller. If the soil becomes wet the LCD displays wet and the motor will not pump the
water to the field.

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2.2 FLOW CHART

The working principle of our project is described as flow chart below.

Fig1: Flow chart of the system

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This shows the controller receives a status of the soil moisture temperature content and if this
value is greater than the desired value then the controller displays DRY SOIL on the LCD and it
switches ON the transistor and the pumping motor will pump the water. But if the value of
temperature is in the desired value the microcontroller displays WET SOIL on the LCD and the
motor is continue in off .

2.3 BLOCK DIAGRAM OF THE SYSTEM

The system design is described as block diagram below

Fig 2: Block Diagram of the system

Of liquid the main components of the systems are described in the block diagram. These
components are described below.
1-Soil moisture sensor; this is a device that senses the content of moisture of the soil. Then by
sensing the content of the moisture this sensor gives the status of the soil moisture to the
microcontroller. This sensor can be made from LM35 temperature sensor that gives a linear
proportion to the temperature as voltage.

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2-Arduino microcontroller: the controller used in our project is arduino uno R3 to contol the
system pumping by giving appropriate signal depending on the received data from the soil
moisture.
3-LCD: It is the abbreviation of liquid crystal display. It is a flat panel, electronic visual display,
or video display that uses the liquid modulating properties crystals.
4-AN NPN 2N1711 BJT: is used to amplify the output of the Arduino and feed to the motor to
pump and irrigate the land.
5-Pumping motor: is used to pump water to the land when the soil is dry.

CHAPTER THREE
SYSTEM DESIGN AND MAKING PROTOTYPE
3.1 SYSTEM DESIGN
As we have mentioned above this system contains different hardware components. This system
also needs software components in order to be fully working system. Basically, this project
consists of an input and an output. The input is the soil moisture sensor and irrigation timer and
the output is the irrigation water pumper and LCD displayer.
Soil moisture sensor gives input to the controller and the output of the controller will drive the
pumping motor to activate. The output of the controller is driven by the Arduino controller itself.
For this project, temperature of 25C is the value indicated to turn on and off the motor. If the
temperature is higher than 25C, the motor will turn on and vice versa. At first, the controller
will scan the environment temperature. We used stepper motor to control the position of the
water flow. For the sake of safety the controller we use 2N1711silcon NPN low power transistor.
Soil Moisture Sensor: in this project LM35 is used as soil temperature sensor.
The LM35 series are precision integrated-circuit temperature sensors, whose output voltage is
linearly proportional to the Celsius (Centigrade) temperature. The LM35 does not require any
external calibration or trimming to provide typical accuracies of 14C at room temperature and
34C over a full 55 to +150C temperature range. The LM35s low output impedance, linear
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output, and precise inherent calibration make interfacing to readout or control circuitry especially
easy. It can be used with single power supplies, or with plus and minus supplies. As it draws only
60 A from its supply, it has very low self-heating, less than 0.1C in still air.
Features of LM35

Calibrated directly in Celsius (Centigrade)

Linear + 10.0 mV/C scale factor

0.5C accuracy guarantee able (at +25C)

Rated for full 55 to +150C range Suitable for remote applications

Low cost due to wafer-level trimming

Operates from 4 to 30 volts

Less than 60 A current drain

Low self-heating, 0.08C in still air

Nonlinearity only 14C typical

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impedance

output,

0.1

for

mA

load

Fig 3: soil moisture sensor

Microcontroller
Digital Pins: How the pins work and what it means for them to be configured as inputs or
outputs.
Analog Input Pins: Details about the analog-to-digital conversion and other uses of the pins.
PWM: How the analog Write () function simulates an analog output using pulse-width
modulation.
Memory: The various types of memory available on the Arduino board.and used to for storage
the data.

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Fig 4: Arduino microcontroller

3.2 Overall system design

The system design in short has one inputs and two outputs. The inputs are soil moisture sensor
where the outputs are displaying of the LCD and the pumping motor controlling. LCD will flash
when the outputs of the two inputs are given to the microcontroller at the same time, which it
will then, indicates that the plants need water. The second output is the pumper ON/OFF which is
controlled by microcontroller.
This embedded system works in a simple way, the system basically consists of moisture
temperature level sensors, controller and motor. The controller converts the analog signal from
each sensor which is buried inside the soil, to digital values .This is compared with a value
representing the minimum allowable moisture content of the soil. Once any of these sensors
reads a value below this minimum value, a signal is sent to turn on the corresponding solenoid
valve to allow water flow into the farm. But its good to work like this, but in this design the
signals that are responsible to switch the solenoid valves are queued.
This is to make sure that irrigation is carried out once in a day and preferably in the morning, to
save energy and as well crops health. Every procedure in scheduling is controlled by the program
inside the controller watering system. The core problems encountered is the manual intervention
of farmers and the unplanned wastage of water.
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As shown in the block diagram, the inputs to the Arduino are soil moisture sensor and the mini
push button switches & the outputs are the LCD and the water pump.
When the soil moisture sensor detects that there is no enough moisture in the soil (0V-No
moisture, 3V Moisture present) it signals the Arduino sending it the analog input values as a
result of the reading from the soil.
If there is enough moisture, the water-pump does not start. But, if the sensor detects no moisture
in the soil, it sends signals in to the Arduino which in turn energize the transistor as the result
pump motor is on and irrigate the land. The simulated circuit diagram is shown below.

Fig 5: the overall circuit diagram of the simulated project

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3.3 software requirement and designing prototype

The project design needs program with simulated circuit diagram together with proteus.
But the best software requirements for this project are

Arduino Uno R3

Arduino programming language

Proteus software

The component are:

Arduino Uno R3

LCD(16*2)

Pumping motor

2N1711 BJT

Pumping motor

LM35 temperature sensor

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CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
4.1 CONCLUSION
Input for precision-irrigation systems. Microcontroller-based circuits provide advantages over
traditional electronic designs, including simpler designs with fewer components, by replacing
hardware components with software functions. Microcontrollers have the potential to be applied
in many agricultural applications to provide automation, data collection, and control capability to
reduce labor requirements and increase the frequency of measurements and operations. The
sensor and the network architecture readily fulfill the requirements of the vast irrigated fields,
and helps in real time monitoring of the moisture content around the roots of the individual
planted crop. Embedded system for automatic irrigation of a field offers a potential solution to
support site-specific irrigation management that allows producers to maximize their productivity
while saving the water. This project is designed using Arduino microcontroller. The moisture
sensor detects the soil temperature content. And it will feed to the microcontroller.
The availability of inexpensive, automated monitoring devices, such as the moisture-sensor data
logger discussed, may increase the adoption of moisture monitoring for use in scheduling
irrigations. Where real-time scheduling of irrigations is not possible, the device could be used to
monitor the irrigation practices in effect to gauge their performance.
Through low-cost and low-labor requirements, more information can be collected more easily,
making moisture monitoring and irrigation scheduling more attractive and feasible.
A further, planned enhancement to the circuit, the addition of remote data collection via wireless
communication, would provide the capability of real-time monitoring of field conditions

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4.2 RECOMENDATION
We know that agriculture is the most important source of income in countries like Ethiopia so to
improve agricultural products irrigation system is the first method to achieve this goal. We
implement this project by using soil moisture sensor as input. The desired output from our input
were flashing LCD and controlling the pumper by using a microcontroller output. Besides the
project will successful if you have water level sensor inside the water tanker. Further it will be
attractive if you implement a program that sends a message to a personal computer that happens
during irrigation.
Generally the irrigation system is built to solve social, economic, and environmental and societal
problems for ones country which it will lead to development.

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REFERANCES
[1] Vreeken, J., Wiering, M., Veenen, and Koop man, A. 2004 automatic self-control water
pumping report. UU-CS-2004-029.
[2] Lin Dong, Wushan Chen. Real-Time automatic self-control for rural development 2010.
21605912
[3] Arduino http://www.arduino.cc

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APPENDIXES
We have used Arduino language program to implement our project. This program is
written as follows:
#include <LiquidCrystal.h> //include LiquidCrystal library
LiquidCrystal lcd(12,11,5,4,3,2);
float c;
void setup() {
// put your setup code here, to run once:
lcd.begin(16,2);
lcd.clear();
lcd.setCursor(0,0);
lcd.print("temp:=");
pinMode(13,OUTPUT);
pinMode(1,OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
// put your main code here, to run repeatedly:
c=map(analogRead(A0),0,1023,0,500);
lcd.setCursor(5,0);

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lcd.print(c);
if(c>=25){
lcd.setCursor(2,1);
lcd.print("soil is dry ");
digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
digitalWrite(1,HIGH);
}
else{
lcd.setCursor(1,1);
lcd.print(" soil is wet ");
digitalWrite(13,LOW);
digitalWrite(1,LOW);
}
}

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