Abstract

Greenhouse farming is a trending practice to secure food production in desert environments. Such a practice often requires sensing systems to monitor the greenhouse microclimate. However, traditional monitoring systems are often limited by their feature size, energy consumption, and maintenance cost. To address these issues, this article introduces a luXSensing beacon—an energy harvesting sensing device empowered with Bluetooth communication technology to perform continuous environmental sensing. To enable long-lasting or even batteryless operation of the sensing device, we propose a novel and generic design methodology to suggest minimum energy harvesting hardware requirements, namely the photovoltaic panel's area and supercapacitor's size for energy storage. In addition, a lifetime model is also proposed to calculate the extended lifetime of a hybrid energy harvesting device if it is equipped with a backup battery. Based on the proposed methodology, a prototype system is developed, deployed, and tested in a desert greenhouse. The luXSensing beacon demonstrated its capability of monitoring air temperature and illuminance continuously in a 24/7 manner. The comparative compactness and low-energy consumption of the system are advantageous not only to its deployment in greenhouses but also to the reduction of energy budget and the maintenance cost of greenhouse farming.