COMPARISON OF THE RESPONSES OF LOW COST ELETRICAL SOIL SENSORS, AND A ARDUINO MICROCONTROLLER PLATFORM

Abstract

This work aims to study the precision agriculture, and from previous studies compare the results of collected data by electrical conductivity sensors using measurement instruments dedicated as ohmmeters, with data from the same electrical conductivity sensors collected through a microcontroller using the Arduino platform. With a simple circuit and the use of analog inputs of the microcontroller, seek to automate some processes of soil analysis. Arduino platform was chosen because it uses the concept of open hardware, have libraries and an open source development platform (free). With the choice of sensors, this work was carried out at the “Fazenda Capão da Onça”, belonging to the State University of Ponta Grossa, in an area of approximately 13 hectares, 60 measurements were recorded at different points. The data collected by Arduino were compared with data obtained using an analog multimeter. The developed system stores the data into a memory card. As a comparator, we used the electrical resistance of the soil. After comparison and correlation of data obtained, it was verified the possibility of making use of the microcontroller to obtain measures from  soil electrical conductivity sensor.