Invention of a Cutting Development Chamber with Microcontroller-Based Multiparameter Monitoring for Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA)

This study presents the design, construction, and evaluation of a modular chamber for the vegetative propagation of cuttings, capable of simultaneously accommodating three plant cuttings at equidistant positions within a compact volume of 40 cm × 45 cm × 15 cm. It integrates distributed sensing using DHT22 temperature and relative humidity sensors, a BH1750 light sensor, and an MQ-2 gas/smoke detection sensor; programmable lighting via four NeoPixel WS2812B boards arranged in two parallel rows; and an ESP32 microcontroller responsible for processing, wireless communication, and threshold-based feedback control of environmental variables. The system was continuously monitored for four weeks to characterize the internal foliar microclimate in relation to external environmental conditions. Internal temperatures ranged from a weekly average of 25.26 °C to 28.71 °C, while relative humidity in the foliar zone varied between 28.99% and 41.24%. The lighting system provided stable and repeatable illuminance conditions, with weekly averages reaching up to 111.10 lux, and the gas sensor enabled continuous detection of transient variations in gas concentration within the chamber. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed chamber as a compact, modular, and replicable platform for environmental data acquisition and experimental control in future studies on plant cutting propagation, biological rooting performance was not evaluated in the present study, therefore, the reported results primarily validate the technical and environmental performance of the developed prototype.