Development of a movable farm-data acquisition system with PDA and GPS

It is the basic need for carrying out precision agriculture to acquire the farmland information in real-time. A movable farm-data acquisition system was developed based on PDA and GIS technology in the paper. By using GIS technology, the system could collect and manage the information of the farmland geography location and the field parameters such as soil moisture, soil EC, soil temperature, and environment moisture. It integrated the ZigBee coordinator module, GPS-OEM module, GPRS module, and embedded GIS module as a whole mobile intelligent farming solution. ZigBee module was used for coordinating and managing the field wireless sensors network and collecting the farmland information through the network. GPS module was used for collecting and managing the geographic location information of each sampling point and collecting the boundary geographic information of the target sampling field. GPRS module was used for the remote communicating and transferring the farmland information between the system and the host PC. The movable farm-data acquisition system could be used to collect the farmland information in real-time. It could manage the several of information of the farming fields effectively. It was proved that the movable farm-data acquisition system based on the ZigBee wireless sensors network and GIS was convenient and practical for collecting and managing the farming information.