A Remote Monitoring System For Automatic Soil Column Weighing

Roots are organs that anchor plants and absorb and transport water and nutrients from thesoil. They directly exploit the soil and make important contributions to plant productivity.However, because the root system grows beneath the ground, root sampling processes arevery destructive and labor intensive, which has hindered the in-depth development of rootsystem research. Recently, novel root observation methods (beyond the previous root-diggingsampling) have been developed. A plastic tube soil column method has frequently been usedin crop root research, especially for dry-land crops. To improve the level of automaticobservation of crop root system growth of evapotranspiration, a remote monitoring system forautomatic soil column weighing was designed. The main works and conclusions are asfollows:(1) With the soil column of the situ dynamic root monitoring system, overall structural designof the remote monitoring system for automatic soil column weighing was completed formonitoring of the environment in the basement. First, a CP-168U multiport serial card and aRS-232serial cable as the middle bridge were used to connect the PC computer and twentyelectronic balances together forming a basement monitoring system to monitor the soilcolumn weight change in real time. Second, the weighing data was transmitted by the Internetto the database located on the web server in real time for storage and sharing.(2) Based on the overall structural design of the automatic soil column weighing system andresearch status, the structural design and customization of electronic weighing, the select ofserial port module, the production of the RS-232extension cord and a single serial port testwere completed.(3) The Web-based multiport serial automatic soil column weighing system software wasdeveloped based on the browser/server (BS)“thin client” model using the Java programminglanguage in the MyEclipse development environment and using the electronic weighingtechnology, the Internet data transmission technology, database technology, Web applicationtechnology and so on. The soil-root water evapotranspiration data and charts could be gotwithout getting out of households. System tests showed relatively good stability and real-timeperformance. The automatic soil column weighing system developed in this study surpassed thetraditional method of centralized data collection and thus provided an advanced method thatcould be used to automatically monitor the root system growth process of evapotranspiration.