Development of a Remote Microclimate Wireless Monitoring System

With a large amount of development and utilization of natural environment by the mankind, there are more and more unusual climatic changes. Microclimate among them is most easily influenced by the environmental change. Besides, microclimate is also one of the sources controlling of ecosystem’s change. This research integrates GSM-SMS wireless communication mechanism, Global Positioning System (GPS), mechatronic technique, and internet to establish an automatic microclimate monitoring system. It is effective to replace the traditional method. The system is composed of a remote platform and a host control platform. A low power 16 bit RISC microcontroller MSP430F449 is adopted as core processor of the remote platform. MSP430F449 is utilized to integrate data, control other modules, and collect environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. Moreover, some expansion ports are preserved for other sensors. The host control platform is responsible to receive, manage, store, and show the data from remote platform. LabVIEW 7.0 is adopted as a development tool for User Graphical Interface (GUI) of the host control platform, and integrated with GSM module to develop the SMS receiving program. SMS receiving program takes charge of receiving data and storing data in the MySQL database. The dynamic webpage is established by Apache and PHP. Dynamic webpage can show the latest and past microclimate data to user by internet in any place. According to the field test done outdoors, the remote platform can work steady on the environment of outside. The mean of SMS transmitting time is 26.5 s. The mean of GPS distance error is 9.64 m. The proposed system can accurately measure the different of microclimate.