Monitoring System for Tobacco Drying Machine Using IoT Technology

Tobacco is one of the most widely cultivated plants in Indonesia, especially in highland areas. Conventional tobacco drying process relies on solar heat. The biggest problem in drying using the sun is erratic weather and also in highland areas, the chance of rainfall is also high. Monitoring system of tobacco drying machines using Internet of Things (IoT) technology is the answer to the problems that occur. By utilizing IoT technology, this tobacco drying machine can be monitored remotely using smartphone or other mobile device. Monitoring that can be done remotely is temperature inside the drying machine, the weight of tobacco during drying, and also On Off state of the drying machine. In this study, monitoring system for tobacco drying machines uses a BUS topology that connects several Arduino nanoas a slave and Arduino mega 2560 as a master. Arduino nanoplays a role in controlling the DS18B20 temperature sensor, load cell, heater relay, and fan relay. Arduino mega as a master acts as a data processing center and main control in the monitoring system of the temabkau drying machine. ESP8266 is used to connect to the internet using wifi. There is simple Blynk application on smartphone as an IoT platform. After some testing done, it turns out that tobacco drying machine has good performance in terms of tobacco weight reduction, down to to 29,97% (load cell) and 30,56% (digital scales). However, internal machine temperature during drying process only reach 42,75° C. Data transmission delay from the serial monitor to Blynk IoT Platform has a poor value based on TIPHON standardization, which is 1.4 seconds. However, data error rate between serial monitor and Blynk is very small, 0,099% for load cell data and 0,28% for temperature sensor data.