Arduino based Automatic Monitoring Enviroment by sensors and GSM - UGC0725009

The paper introduces an Arduino-based system that uses sensors to monitor environmental parameters temperature, humidity, water level, and light intensity and transmits data through a GSM module. It aims to create an affordable, real-time monitoring system for general environmental or agricultural use.

High Relevance: The paper addresses the crucial topic of real-time environmental monitoring, which has applications across agriculture, home automation, and industrial safety. The goal of providing immediate alerts when parameters exceed a threshold is highly valuable.

Simplicity and Accessibility: The project utilizes common, low-cost components (Arduino Uno, DHT11, basic sensors). This makes the system easy to replicate for students, hobbyists, or researchers in resource constrained settings.

Reliable Alert Mechanism: The choice of using the GSM/SMS system provides a highly robust alerting method. Unlike Wi-Fi or cloud-based systems, SMS alerts are reliable in areas with poor or absent internet connectivity, ensuring that critical notifications are deleverded.

Weaknesses and Areas for Improvement

While the concept is practical, the article falls short of academic rigor and lacks technical depth in several key areas:

1. Limited Novelty and Technical Depth

The most significant weakness is the lack of a clear, novel contribution. The combination of an Arduino, common environmental sensors, and a GSM module is a widely implemented project, often used as a standard academic or hobbyist exercise.

• Reliance on Basic Component Descriptions: Much of the technical section (Sections 2-6) is dedicated to describing the off-the-shelf components (Arduino, GSM shield, sensors) by quoting their basic specifications and connection protocols, rather than focusing on the unique challenges or innovations in their integration.

• Missing System Integration Details: The paper does not discuss complex integration issues like sensor calibration, power management (crucial for GSM modules), or handling noise/errors during data acquisition.

2. Inadequate Evaluation and Results

The paper fails to provide any meaningful quantitative results or performance data.

• Lack of Performance Metrics: There are no metrics on the system's performance, such as SMS latency (how quickly the message is sent), power consumption (essential for a potential remote system), or the accuracy of the sensor readings compared to a reference device.

• Vague "Base Station" Concept: The abstract mentions the data being transmitted to a "base station" and monitored on "smart phones and laptops." However, the described implementation only uses SMS (a basic alert) and local LCD output. The architecture needed for a networked "base station" (e.g., using GPRS data logging or web servers) is completely absent. The flow chart (Fig. 7) confirms this limited scope.

3. Issues with Documented Implementation Code

The provided code snippet (Page 5) appears flawed and incomplete, indicating a lack of thorough verification of the documented system:

• Incorrect Sensor Reading: The code uses int humidity_val = digitalRead(humidity_pin); for the DHT11 sensor. The DHT11 is a digital sensor that requires a complex timing and data-parity sequence to read both temperature and humidity data; a simple digitalRead is insufficient and incorrect.

• Logical Flaw in Alerting: The sendSMS() function is called unconditionally within the main loop(), regardless of the threshold check described in Figure 7. In a real application, this would result in the user's phone being spammed with continuous SMS messages, rendering the alert system unusable.

• Incomplete Display: The LCD printing commands (lcd.print(humidity_val); lcd.print(water_val) lcd.print(light_val);) lack proper spacing or labels, making the output on the physical LCD difficult for a user to interpret.