Towards Low-Cost Low-Power Activity-Aware Soil Moisture Sensing Platform for Large-scale Farming
Jack Thoene, Omar Kamil, Thekra Alkadee, Nivedita Arora

TL;DR
This paper introduces a low-cost, battery-free soil moisture sensing platform for large-scale farming that operates on harvested solar energy, providing reliable, real-time data collection integrated into farmers' routines.
Contribution
The authors present a novel, scalable, and cost-effective soil moisture sensing system using battery-free sensors and a mobile basestation, enabling persistent data collection in rural farms.
Findings
Reliable communication over 1 km at 2 dBm transmit power.
Stable sensor readings over 70 days of indoor operation.
Continuous data recovery during intermittent connections.
Abstract
Deep understanding of a field's soil moisture content is the leading indicator for predicting crop yields and making data driven decisions for irrigation and application of topical chemicals for drought resilience. Despite this importance, the cost of adopting and maintaining IoT infrastructure prevents modern farms from employing widespread real time soil moisture sensors. We present an end-to-end platform of buried battery-free sensor nodes and a mobile basestation that leverages the farmer's daily routine for data retrieval. Each node features a self-powered galvanic soil-moisture probe, employing a high impedance analog front end to enable durability. Operating entirely on harvested solar energy for up to 21 days on a single capacitor charge, each node collects soil moisture, temperature, and environment condition data. Using a predictable finite-state machine, handshake-based data…
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