A Simple Platform for Emulating Irrigation Scenarios and Its Applicability for Big Data Collection Toward Water Preservation via In Situ Experiments

Modern agriculture has to alleviate extremes in water demand and/or water waste. In this regard, this work showcases how soil moisture instruments can be combined with low-end microcontrollers, energy-efficient communication protocols, single-board computers, flow and pressure sensors, and purpose-built actuators to form a synergistic platform able to generate and study realistic irrigation scenarios. These scenarios, potentially emulating anomalies such as clogged emitters or pipe leaks with a satisfactory time granularity of a few minutes, provide valuable data that pave the way for the creation of intelligent models intercepting water misuse events and/or irrigation failures. The proposed system utilizes widely available, well-documented, low-cost components to form a functioning whole which is optimized for outdoor, low-power, low-maintenance and long-term operation and is accessible remotely via typical end-user devices. Two drip irrigation points were set up, each having a TEROS 12 and a TEROS 10 instrument placed at different depths, while a prototype water flow/pressure control and report system was developed. All modules sent data in real time, via LoRa, to a central node implemented using a Raspberry Pi for further processing and to make them widely available via common network infrastructures, also provisioning for remote scenario invocation. The system does not claim to achieve specific irrigation water savings, but it contributes to maintaining/increasing the benefits of modern irrigation practices (such as drip irrigation). This goal is served by emulating a wide variety of irrigation events and by gathering and studying the corresponding data. These multimodal data are collected at a frequency of a few minutes, reflecting key irrigation-specific parameters with an accuracy better than or equal to 3%. The exact steps for specific hardware and software component interoperation are clearly explained, allowing other teams of researchers and/or university educators worldwide to be inspired and benefit from platform replication.