Building smarter farming irrigation with Raspberry Pi and IoT
While you and I may be content with waiting until we notice the leaves on our houseplants turning a little yellow before poking a finger in the soil to check if it’s dry, Arad Soutehkeshan, a student from the University of Greenwich, is operating on a different level. As part of the MathWorks Sustainability and Renewable Energy Challenge, Arad designed an intelligent irrigation system, helping to take a meaningful step towards tackling the global water crisis.
Urgent innovation
As explained in Arad’s build video, The Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that traditional irrigation methods waste up to 60% of the water intended for crops. This isn’t just wasteful — it’s catastrophic in regions already battling water scarcity. Arad wanted to combat this issue and, at the same time, contribute to the emerging smart agriculture market with a low-cost solution using Raspberry Pi and open source IoT (Internet of Things).
Hardware
Brain: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (with an Ethernet cable for stable connectivity)
Eyes: Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 NoIR, taking regular snapshots of the plant for time-lapse monitoring
Sensors: Capacitive soil moisture sensor, temperature and humidity sensor, light sensor
Actuators: Water pump controlled by a 2-channel 5V relay
Cress seeds were the foliage of choice for this experiment.
Visual data and IoT
The Raspberry Pi is controlled via the dataplicity terminal, which keeps scripts running and allows you to check in on them remotely without needing to manually babysit.
Sensor readings — including moisture levels, temperature, humidity, light exposure, and pump activation duration — are all sent to ThingSpeak, a cloud IoT analytics platform. This enables Arad to create compelling real-time dashboards, scatter plots, and even kernel density estimations, such as correlating soil moisture with watering time. Being able to visualise the very clear relationship between existing soil moisture and the decreased need to water plants encourages smarter agricultural practices, potentially preventing astronomical amounts of water wastage.
ThingSpeak is also a proactive system. It checks soil moisture every six hours and fires off an email if sensor readings are outside the healthy range.
Timelapse growth diary
Photos taken by the Raspberry Pi camera are deposited into Dropbox folders with date and time stamps. These are then stitched into a timelapse video, forming a visual diary of growth (and proof that the system works). You can watch as your plants go from over- or under-watered wilts to efficiently thriving members of our ecosystem.
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