Affiliations:
College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Sichuan Agricultural University, Ya’an, China
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. L.J. Xu, College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Sichuan Agricultural University, Ya’an 625014, China. Tel./Fax: +86 08352882035; E-mail: lijiaxu13@163.com.
Abstract: This study designs an intelligent soilless culture device that overcomes the disadvantages of the traditional soilless culture device, such as complex structure, low automation, and management inconvenience. The said device has an embedded controller S3C6410 as its core and realizes the intelligent supplemental lighting of the soilless culture device. It is also capable of the automatic heating, automatic circulation, and automatic ion concentration balance of the nutrient solution by detecting the illumination, ion concentration of the nutrient solution, temperature, and other parameters through sensors. The soilless culture device also communicates with a mobile phone in real time through the CDMA module. The users can query various parameters of the device any time and send the control command in real time through the mobile phone. After testing, the device not only realizes on-demand and subband intelligent supplemental lighting and the automatic concentration balance, automatic heating, and automatic circulation of the nutrient solution, but also achieves remote wireless monitoring through the mobile phone. The culture contrast experiment of the leaf lettuce shows that the device developed in this study is superior to other traditional soilless cultivation devices. It has the significant characteristics of strong practicability, good scalability, stable and reliable work, and intuitive and simple manipulation.
