Introduction:
IoT (Internet of Things) based technologies are widely used across the world for various applications in different domains. This is due to availability of low cost MCU boards housing wireless ICs based on different wireless standards such as wifi, cellular (GSM/LTE), Zigbee, Zwave, LoRa etc. One such application has been described in this article which helps perishable food or vegetables to be delivered before they get stale.

Perishable Food and Vegetables delivery tracking architecture

The above photo depicts architecture of the perishable tracking system. There are three main parts of the system viz. data acquisition, data storage and analysis and grade data monitoring. The heart of the system is microprocessor based board ESP32. There are various other boards which can also be used. Let us understand these system components.

ESP32 board: It is very cheap and consists of all the essential system functionalities. It houses 12 bit analog to digital converter which can convert analog data provided by sensors to digital formats for further analysis. It houses 32 bit LX6 microprocessor, SRAM and other peripheral interfaces such as GPIOs, I2C, UART, I2S, SPI etc. It has wifi and bluetooth wireless functionalities. Portable USB power bank is used to power the ESP32 board. We have used wifi to connect with adafruit cloud for data storage. Refer ESP32 vs ESP8266 Which describes difference between ESP8266 and ESP32.

Data Acquisition: The data acquision from food and vegetables boxes have been carried out using sensors such as temperature, humidity and odour. The data from these sensors are passed to MCU through ADC. The data is read by MCU and passed to adafruit server for storage.

Cloud data Storage and Analysis: Adafruit cloud storage is used for  data storage. The other popular cloud data storage provides include Google cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, AWS from Amazon etc. The dashboards in adafruit help in visualizing sensor data. The data is transferred to google sheets for further data analysis using applets developed at IFTTT website. Google sheets compare real time data with optimum thresholds set for temperature, humidity and odour. Based on this, each box is assigned a grade in sheets.

Data monitoring: Using JSON or any other technique, data is moved from google sheets to application running on android mobile phone. There should be internet connectivity in the mobile phone to monitor the data in real time. The grade and delivery location of each of the boxes are monitored before they get spoiled.

Advantages of Perishable Food and Vegetables delivery tracking

Following are the benefits or advantages of Perishable Food and Vegetables delivery tracking system.
➤The system helps in monitoring deterioration in the quality of the food/vegetables during transportation. This helps to deliver them before they get spoiled.
➤The system helps to reduce loss due to wastage of agricultural produce between source and destination.
➤The system is very easy to be managed by delivery people.

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