Abstract:
This research work undertakes the development of water pumping system (with emphasis on Irrigation) that is capable of automatically managing water budgets from a reservoir through a microcontroller subsystem. The water pumping for irrigation system can be used in gardens, farms, urban/rural water supply systems, and in fact, general water management systems for both domestic and industrial applications. The key objective of this research is to develop a user-friendly and efficient water management system that has the capability to irrigate farms based on automated algorithm, logic and electronic circuitry. The entire water pumping system is comprised water of store/reservoir, water-level sensor,(micro)controller, filter, pump, valves, soil-moisture-content sensor and software system. In this study, most of these were implemented but filters and valves were not implemented because of the scope of this study. The Object Oriented System Analysis and Design (OOSAD) methodology was used for the analysis and development of the system under consideration. The software application communicates directly with a microcontroller unit and uses manual over-ride approach in some cases to manage water budgets. The water-level sensor checks the level of water storage in a reservoir and reports to an electronic controller; the soil-moisture-content sensor checks the soil moisture content and also reports to the controller. The water pumping software for irrigation system was developed using the following languages: C# for Windows application development, for establishing routines and relationships; Embedded C was used in defining status and processes in the Aduino Uno microcontroller; PHPMyAdmin as a database management system and MYSQL relational database server version 5.5 as the backend for storing user inputs from the frontend. The water-pumping software for irrigation system provides the user interface providing irrigation in gardens or farms. The system was able to perform as expected; pumping water from reservoir which can be used to irrigate
farms or gardens.
