Design and experiment of an embedded multi-function wireless sensor for multi-service agricultural information acquisition

Multi-service agricultural information has several data forms including text, audio, image and video. How to rapidly acquire and wirelessly transmit multi-service agricultural information is an essential prerequisite for sustainable development of precision agriculture. Devices for agricultural information acquisition in precision agriculture have different varieties and various input/output interfaces; however, these devices have only one single function and are lack of extensibility. To meet the demand of multi-service agricultural information acquisition in precision agriculture, a multi-service agricultural information acquisition sensor node (MAIAS) with multi-function integration was developed based on Android. A SC7731 chip is used as microcontroller chip of the node. Combined with ADC interface, microphone, image sensor, WiFi and 3G mobile communication module, the node was designed for rapid acquisition and wireless transmission of multi-service agricultural information in form of text, audio, image and video. To verify the performance of agricultural information acquisition and wireless data transmission of the node, experiments were conducted to acquire data of soil moisture content, audio, image and video in laboratory conditions. Audio data were transmitted by
3G mobile communication networks; the average transmission rate was about 21KB/s. Considering of large data volume, image and video data was transmitted using WiFi network, with the average rate of 2.63MB/s. The results show that the node could be connected with sensors for text information acquisition by ADC interface, and could satisfy the requirement on data acquisition of audio, image and video. The results also indicate that the node was feasible for rapid acquisition and wireless transmission of multi-service agricultural information in precision agriculture.