KKU-SSAS: Autonomous Industrial Hydroponic System

01 // SYSTEM OVERVIEW

An enterprise-grade autonomous hydroponic management platform featuring closed-loop environmental control (pH, EC, water temperature, atmospheric humidity), dual-mode edge operation (standalone direct offline vs. fleet gateway), and multi-tower fleet coordination.

02 // PROBLEM SPECIFICATION

Precision indoor agriculture requires non-stop, closed-loop regulation of critical nutrients and water parameters. Network disconnections in greenhouse environments often lead to catastrophic crop failure if systems rely solely on cloud decision-making.

03 // ENGINEERING SOLUTION

Engineered a resilient dual-mode architecture. In Standalone Direct Mode, the ESP32 microcontroller executes autonomous local PID dosage loops offline with zero cloud dependency. In Fleet Gateway Mode, multiple tower nodes aggregate telemetry into an on-premise Raspberry Pi edge gateway running containerized FastAPI services and PostgreSQL.

04 // SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE & DATA FLOW

Analog Sensors (pH, EC, Water Temp, DHT22) -> ESP32 Microcontroller (Local PID Loop & Actuator Relays) -> Direct Wi-Fi AP or Industrial MQTT -> Raspberry Pi Edge Gateway (Dockerized FastAPI + PostgreSQL) -> Flutter Cross-Platform Client.

05 // VERIFIED OUTCOMES

• [1]Maintained continuous nutrient regulation with zero downtime during network blackouts
• [2]Synchronized telemetry across multi-tower installations with sub-second latency over local MQTT
• [3]Packaged closed-source customer distribution using obfuscated Docker containerization

06 // TECHNICAL CONSTRAINTS & CHALLENGES

• —Calibrating sensitive analog pH and EC probes against electrical noise from submersible pump switching
• —Implementing strict fail-safe state machines to prevent toxic nutrient over-dosing on sensor faults

07 // ARCHITECTURAL TAKEAWAYS

• →Hardware-level safety interlocks must precede any software control loop in autonomous systems
• →Deploying dual-mode operational fallbacks guarantees industrial fault tolerance