Microcosmo: Smart Plant Growth Study Environment based on IoT technologies and Raspberry PI

Microcosmo is a Field simulation system as a technological solution to study the growth of plants subjected to experimental conditions. It is a complete two area system, one epigean area where is growing the leaves part of the plant and the hypogeum area where the roots of the plant are growing. Both areas are controlled for air condition (i.e.: cooling, heating, humidity) and epigean area is controlled for light conditions through LEDs. The system controls all the parameters through an IoT platform develop on top of the Raspberry PI 3+ hardware platform. The IoT software controls the devices, through the USB/Bluetooth and GPIO interfaces, for managing temperature/air through two Peltier systems, six intensive multi-spectral LED panels (deep red, far red, lime, blue and cool white), a humidifier as well as temperature and humidity sensors and a video camera system connected with Raspberry PI. The IoT software platform has been developed in Java programming language for multi-platform support and is based on MQTT for communication towards external systems and on Tomcat/Web/Vaadin frameworks for accessing the control system remotely.