【Innovative Application】Zigbee multi-protocol chip helps smart agriculture

Agricultural automation has been actively promoted worldwide in recent years and is also an important measure for agricultural modernization. A greenhouse covers at least three acres, and sometimes dozens of acres. Therefore, wireless technology used in agriculture requires wide coverage and penetration. The basic rate of Zigbee is 250kb/s . When it is reduced to 28kb/s , the transmission range can be expanded to 134m and higher reliability can be achieved. In addition, it can be connected to 254 nodes. For example, a greenhouse covers dozens of acres and more than 200 devices can be covered by one network. This is difficult to achieve with Wi-Fi , Bluetooth or other wireless technologies.

In response to the development needs of smart agriculture, Silicon Labs (also known as " Core Technology " ) partners have recently developed a complete set of solutions based on Silicon Labs' reliable and stable Zigbee products. The solution embeds Zigbee modules in each module, and all Zigbee modules use Silicon Labs ' Zigbee chips, which can be used for real-time monitoring and control of parameters such as air temperature and humidity, soil temperature and humidity, light, CO2 concentration, soil pH , wind speed and direction, and rainfall in the growing environment.

The previous version of this smart agriculture solution used Silicon Labs ' EM357 , but due to the increasing requirements for data transmission speed and signal stability, the newer generation of EFR32MG series wireless multi-protocol SoC was adopted . Compared with the EM357 M3 core, Silicon Labs EFR32MG uses a 32- bit ARM Cortex-M4 , which has a higher level of performance and is convenient for product function expansion and subsequent product upgrade maintenance. Silicon Labs ' EFR32MG wireless signal has a maximum adjustable transmission power of 20dBm , which is a very good choice for long-distance applications.

In addition, the temperature and humidity sensors and light sensor nodes of the smart agricultural system have no AC power supply in the greenhouse and are generally powered by batteries, which have high requirements for ultra-low power consumption. Silicon Labs ' EFR32MG1 has ultra-low power consumption characteristics, which is 60μA/MHz in EM0 , 1.35μA in EM2 deep sleep current ( RAM is fully retained and RTCC is run from LFXO ) , and 1uA in EM3 stop current (state /RAM retention) , which fully meets the ultra-low power consumption application requirements of battery-powered temperature and humidity sensors and light sensor nodes.

The following is a working block diagram of Silicon Labs ZigBee chips used in smart agriculture and plant factories.

Taking smart agriculture as an example, it can be seen from the figure that the system mainly uses cloud platform and mobile network architecture. Multiple users share a cloud platform system. Users can view the real-time values ​​of environmental parameters on their own computers or smart phones. When relevant parameters exceed the limit, an alarm message is issued to remind users to take corresponding measures. In addition, control instructions can be issued to related equipment on mobile phones or computers to achieve remote control of multiple greenhouses and farms anytime and anywhere. Combined with images, crop growth conditions can be observed and recorded, and self-adjustments can be made to adapt to different environments according to seasons, climate, and special factors (flood season, drought).

The smart agriculture solution using Silicon Labs ' EFR32MG1 has the advantages of simple architecture and strong mobility, and has certain feasibility.

Related technical documents Silicon Labs EFR32MG13 Mighty Gecko multi-protocol wireless SoC series data sheet:

https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/data-sheets/efr32mg13-datasheet.pdf

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