Design and Development of an Embedded Framework to test Soil for Urban Terrace Farming

The proposed work focuses on the design and development of an embedded system framework to test the suitability of the soil for urban terrace farming. The need to rush to an agricultural officer or department can be reduced to a certain extent in testing the quality and type of soil at regular intervals with this system. This helps the user in deciding the best plant (specifically cash crops) and fertilizers that are to be used for the growth of plants in the given soil conditions. The soil conditions can be estimated by measuring the pH and moisture content in the soil. The concentration of hydrogen ions (pH) and moisture sensors are used to estimate the pH and soil moisture levels for a particular cash crop. The idea behind the implementation of the proposed system using FPGA is to design it as an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) to ensure the features of parallel processing computations, field re-programmability and faster time-to-market, low cost and power consumption. The proposed user-friendly system eases the process in checking the suitability of the soil, predicting the plants that can be grown in any given condition. The developed framework has been calibrated with the help of a standard pH meter to satisfy the intended use.