Microcontrollers developments and its application to agriculture: A greenhouse control system

The recent new developments in hardware and software tools, and in particul ar of the microprocessors and microcontrollers, are leading to more complex control and management potentialities in the agriculture applications. For the quality and productivity improvement of greenhouse crops it is necessa ry to measure and control several interacting physical variables. Also, to achieve competitiveness in the market, the production costs must be kept as low as possible. These tasks can only be accomplished using control and ma nagement systems with adequate built in software. At the University of Tras -os-Montes and Alto Douro, Vila Real, a data acquisition and control networ k was implemented with the aim of being applied to agricultural processes. This network has three main operating levels. At the lower level, a set of remote microcontroller stations performs the data acquisition and transmiss ion by radio frequency to a collecting and control station. The control sta tion generates the actuating signals for the agricultural process and commu nicates with a higher level network, based on PC's. This higher level netwo rk is responsible for the system management and supervision. In this paper it will be described the implemented network and the results achieved in it s application to the greenhouse environmental and control.