Internet of Things for Smart Gardening and Securing Home from Fire Accidents

Introduction

In recent years, smart home design using internet is increasing due to the availability of high speed communication and to add comfort, convenience, and safety for human beings (Lee and Lee 2015; Gil et al. 2016). Internet of things (IoT) plays a major role in the design of smart homes. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an emerging technology to assist IoT applications.

Recently, there are several applications (Miorandi et al. 2012; Ferdoush and Li 2014), such as smart homes, smart city, smart grids, vehicle monitoring, e-health, smart retail, and smart agriculture, designed using the concept in WSNs (Yick et al. 2008; Akyildiz et al. 2002).

In this chapter, proposal for automating two activities that can convert a home to smart home is discussed. The first activity is to automate the process of protecting home from fire accidents. The second activity is to automate the process of watering the plants in a garden. Fire accident is an unexpected event that could fetch a big loss to social asserts and human life. Fire accidents may occur for different reasons such as short circuit and gas leakage. Fire accidents are reported both in industrial and nonindustrial premises such as residential buildings, educational institutions, hotels, commercial complexes, hospitals, and assembly halls.

The second activity is related to gardening. Gardening is one of the best recreation activity for human being. In recent days, due to their busy schedule, people find it difficult to maintain gardens even though they are interested to have one. The main problem faced in maintenance of a garden is watering the plants on time. An automated plant watering system will help them to have a garden of their own.

Data collection is important operation in IoTs and WSNs. In this proposed work, river formation dynamics (RFD)-based data collection (Guravaiah and Velusamy 2015) is used to collect the data from sensors and store them in database for further analysis.

Recent survey (Imteaj et al. 2017; Vijayalakshmi and Muruganand 2017; Pol et al. 2016; Vaishali et al. 2017; Shekhar et al. 2017; Kissoon et al. 2017; Saraf and Gawali 2017) shows that attempts have been made to reduce fire accidents and watering the gardens using WSNs and IoTs. In this this chapter, we discuss the design and development of the following systems:

• 1. Fire alarm system that can prevent fire accidents
• 2. Smart garden with automated plant watering system
• 3. Using RFDMRP: River Formation Dynamics-based Multi-hop Routing Protocol for data collection from sensors to server for further processing.

In this book chapter, we will deliberate upon the above methods used to protect the home from fire accidents and smart garden with a water planting system. The technology/technical terms used in the book chapter are explained in Sections 5.1 and 5.2. Section 5.3 deals with the existing approaches and limitations of those approaches. Section 5.4 explains the proposed system. Section 5.5 concludes the chapter and presents future research directions. Apart from regular references, additional references are also included in the “References for Advance/Further reading” for the benefit of advanced readers.

Introduction of Different Sensors Used

This section will give the introduction to the different sensor components used in the proposed system.

5.2.1 Temperature Sensor

The temperature sensor (LM35 Temperature Sensor 2018) used to capture temperature from specific sources and modify the collected information into understandable format for the user is shown in Figure 5.1. Temperature sensors are used in several applications, namely, chemical handling, medical devices, food processing units, environmental controls, controlling systems, etc.

5.2.2 Flame Sensor

The flame sensor (Flame 2018) mainly used to detect fire or flame within some geographical area is shown in Figure 5.2. This sensor will be used for fire detection in several applications such as industrial, home, and commercial applications.

5.2.3 Soil Moisture Sensor

Soil moisture sensor (2018) shown in Figure 5.3 will measure the volumetric water content in soil or land. The soil moisture is sensed using copper electrodes. Measurement of moisture content level is calculated using conductivity between the electrodes. This sensor will be useful for measuring

Figure 5.1 Temperature sensor.

Figure 5.2 Flame sensor.

Figure 5.3 Soil moisture sensor.

Figure 5.4 GSM device.

soil moisture in different applications such as soil science, horticulture, botany, environmental science, agricultural science, and biology.

5.2.4 Global System for Mobile Communication

Global system for mobile communications (GSM) (2018) shown in Figure 5.4 is an international standard for mobile telephones. It is also called as second-generation cellular network (2G). GSM can have outgoing

Figure 5.5 Arduino uno.

and incoming voice calls, simple message system (SMS or text messaging), and data communication (via GPRS).

5.2.5 Arduino Uno Micro-Controller

In a flexible micro-controller development platform called Arduino Uno (2018), as shown in Figure 5.5, ATmega328 micro-controller is used to have easy access of hardware and software components. This micro-controller works with the input voltage of 7-12V operating with 16MHz clock speed and 32K flash memory. In addition, this micro-controller has 14 digital I/O pins and 6 analog inputs.