Soil Moisture Monitoring and Water Drip Irrigation on Chili Plants Using Solar Panels

The process of growing chili peppers is carried out with specific irrigation conditions to maintain PH and soil moisture. In chili plants, soil moisture needs around 60% to 80% so that plants can grow optimally. Chili plants do not get optimal nutrition if the soil conditions get excessive or less water, usually because there are still many chili farmers who still do manual watering plants. Farmers always encounter chili plants that experience poor growth so that crop yields have decreased, especially in the last year coupled with hot and dry weather causing the soil to require adequate water intake, this was also felt by one of the farmer groups cultivating chili plants in Kertosari Village, Tanjung Sari District, South Lampung. By utilizing current technological developments, namely the Internet of Things (IoT) which is a technology that can help us monitor and control remotely with the help of the internet so that it greatly facilitates human work. This study aims to build a soil moisture monitoring system and drip irrigation on chili plants. which will be made using the Yl-69 soil moisture sensor as a soil moisture detector, then the sensor will send data through a microcontroller, namely NodeMcu through the android interface. The monitoring system is made using solar panel power.