IoT Sensing Box to Support Small-Scale Farming in Africa

Small-scale farming has an important role in agriculture. Driven by the popularization of the Internet of things (IoT), this paper presents an IoT sensing box prototype coupled with soil analysis through computer vision to help small-scale farmer improve their yields. The idea of combining image-based soil classification with regular soil sensors is to improve the reliability of the sensed data, by minimizing the occurrence of incorrect estimates for specific soil types. The prototype follows a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach, and is based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open source software. Additionally, the prototype includes a casing to house all the hardware which was designed considering standard 3D printing to be easily replicated. As the presented solution is currently on a prototype stage, the validations carried out in a controlled, in-lab environment include guaranteeing the proper process for image acquisition and data quality of the computer vision component (images collected from sensor camera, and their quality), suitable data exchange over the sockets, and the sensing box’s ability to gather data.