Samueli School of Engineering

Traditional methods of watering plants based on timers have been shown to be wasteful when compared to sensor based watering. While sensor based irrigation systems do exist, current implementations are both costly and needlessly complex. Our goal was to design an irrigation sensor system is cheap, easy to implement, and saves more water than traditional watering systems. Our approach was to create a sensor node network that is both reliable and cost effective when installing it. With this approach we were able to create a dependable tree like sensor network that could read moisture data from soil and have it visualized in an Android application. In regards to our Android application, we were able to implement features such as sensor calibration in order to obtain accurate readings. Our tree like network was also able to be consistent in being able to send data packets back and forth with each sensor having a reach of up to 100 meters and being able to have a total of 3125 radio modules in use. In conclusion we were able to create a reliable and cost effective irrigation system that could be used for both farms and home gardens. We were able to meet our initial goals which were to create an user friendly application that could be used to read and visualize data as well creating a sensor network that is low-power and is low cost.  Advisor: Professor Sitao Huang, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science