A low-cost and flexible system for environmental measurement and control in greenhouses based on decentralized autonomous technics, Ubiquitous Environment Control System (UECS), was proposed in 2004. The UECS is composed of autonomous nodes as the minimum units of measurement and control. The nodes can connect with each other through Ethernet or Wi-Fi and can communicate information regardless of manufacturer or model. To realize automation and efficiency of protected horticultural production, two consortia for UECS development and extension were established. During the last 10 years, the UECS has been used to apply environment control in large-scale greenhouses and plant factories. The stability and utility of the UECS have been demonstrated and verified in these practical cultivations. Current research and development are being carried out to install information and communication technology (ICT) systems to improve productivity in existing small-to medium-scale greenhouses in Japan. The flexibility and concept of the UECS have been very effective to enable sophisticated environmental control technology to be applied to small-and medium-scale greenhouses. In this chapter, self-fabricated UECS, the renewal of old environmental control systems using the UECS, and Sub-GHz radio band use for communicating UECS nodes among distributed greenhouses are discussed.
The monitoring node is one of the most important system components in the remote and automatic measurement of environmental information. Simplicity, flexibility, and affordability are critical in agricultural applications. The objective of this study was to design and develop a low-cost and robust remote environmental monitoring node based on a microcontroller board with a wireless communication module and an over-the-air (OTA) update function for flexible node management. The monitoring system consists of a cloud-based global management subsystem and a local management subsystem for each monitoring node. The node was developed using the Particle Core, reprogrammable Wi-Fi development kit, which fulfills the requirements for monitoring node mentioned above. The performance evaluation of the stability and the OTA update function were conducted under two network conditions: (1) high-speed network and (2) regular mobile 3G-network as actual application setup. The stability and availability test observed over 95% of the "timely measurements", a completed measurement within the specified time interval, 99.86% for the condition 1 under high-quality network, and 95.02% for the condition 2. The OTA firmware update process was completed in approximately 60 s. We concluded that the developed environmental monitoring node based on a low-cost microcontroller having internal Wi-Fi module and OTA update function has the potential to increase the simplicity, flexibility, and affordability of remote environmental monitoring node in agricultural applications.
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