IoT-Based Monitoring and Control System for Aeroponic Cultivation: Design, Implementation, and Validation

Abstract

Indonesia’s growing urban population and the accelerating conversion of agricultural land to residential and industrial use have intensified the challenge of domestic food self-sufficiency. Aeroponics, a soil-free cultivation method in which nutrient solution is sprayed directly onto suspended roots, offers a high-yield alternative suited to land-scarce urban environments. However, consistent aeroponic performance depends on precise, continuous control of multiple cultivation parameters, a requirement that manual monitoring cannot reliably fulfill at community or commercial scale. This paper presents the design, implementation, and validation of an IoT-based monitoring and control system for an aeroponic lettuce cultivation setup, evaluated against explicit a priori performance targets: sensor error within the ±5% commercial-grade MAPE threshold, replenishment dosing error within 10%, and 100% functional pass across defined web-interface test scenarios. The system monitors five key parameters pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), water temperature, ambient temperature, and relative humidity and automates two critical control functions: spray timing and nutrient replenishment. System architecture follows a three-tier IoT model: an Arduino Mega / NodeMCU embedded layer, an MQTT–InfluxDB cloud backend, and dual Grafana dashboard and web-based frontend interfaces. The Agile Scrum method was applied throughout the development process. Sensor validation against commercial reference instruments yielded a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 4.39% for TDS and 4.50% for pH, both within the acceptable threshold for commercial-grade devices. Automated nutrient replenishment achieved a MAPE of 6.32%, and spray timing control achieved a scheduling error of 0.047% relative to the configured pulse-pause program. Remote monitoring and set-point configuration via the web interface achieved 100% functional accuracy across five test scenarios. These results, obtained over a short-duration validation period rather than a full crop cycle, demonstrate that the system provides reliable, real-time parameter control adequate for community-scale aeroponic lettuce cultivation in resource-constrained urban environments, pending longer-duration validation before broader reliability claims are warranted.