Research and development of remote communication interface for greenhouse data acquisition system

With the development of modern intensive and scaled greenhouses and the advancement of their intelligent management, modern greenhouse technology is witnessing a trend of integration of greenhouse production and its management through remote communication. In consideration of the shortcomings of RS-485 bus based on greenhouse monitoring and controlling systems, such as short distance of data transmission, exclusive communication protocol, poor scalability, etc, an embedded application of TCP/IP, a remote communication interface for greenhouse data acquisition system by integrating an ordinary 8 bit MCU and an Ethernet controller chip were developed. The system hardware and software schemes were presented in detail and the tailoring strategy of TCP/IP was also discussed. The integration of networking layers of the system bottom and the Internet is preliminarily studied in the paper as well.