Scientific Research and Essays

  • Abbreviation: Sci. Res. Essays
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1992-2248
  • DOI: 10.5897/SRE
  • Start Year: 2006
  • Published Articles: 2767

Article in Press

Sensor system for a continuously and in real time measurement of soil mechanical and physical properties

LIES BOUDHAR, Mahfoud AMARA, Amine Feddal

  •  Received: 09 January 2016
  •  Accepted: 21 October 2018
The sensor system for the analysis of soil physical and mechanical properties in real time and continuously is a set of electronic circuit made around the Arduino Mega 2560 Rev 03 using the ATmega2560 microcontroller. It consists of a 20x4 alphanumeric display, a 4x4 matrix keypad, a conditioning circuit for strain gauges, a Bluetooth module, two 2.4Ghz RF Modules, two pressure sensors, four distance sensors, an electrical soil conductivity sensor, two rotation speed sensors, a GPS, and a power supply circuit. It communicates with a 4.0 Android system and beyond where the application managing all of calculation and decision-making operations is installed. For carrying out and simulation of the hardware system, we have used the electronic simulator software (PROTEUS PRO V8.5 SP0 of Labcenter Electronics Ltd.) as well as the open source software simulator (Fritzing version 0.9.3b). The completion of the firmware is made using the open source Arduino IDE 1.6.11. For the Android application, it was done with Android Studio IDE and SDK 2.1. The system embarks on a two-wheel drive tractor. The Android application for calculation and decision-making operations uses mathematical equations developed by researchers linking the cone index to the slip, the drawbar pull, soil moisture, texture and soil structure

Keywords: he drawbar pull, soil moisture, texture and soil structure