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Top1. Introduction
Precision Agriculture is modern agricultural production, which is also the quintessence of environment protection and continuous farming (Wang, 2009). Precision agriculture is based on information collection, transmission, storage and analysis. With the development of technology, there are more and more new information technologies applied in agriculture domain. Many companies produce all kinds of equipments including advance technology (Mei, 2008). They can use either in tractor or by hand. However, these products are very expensive and the operating-interfaces are usually designed in foreign language. So they do not suit Chinese. In our country, the research of “precision Agriculture” is in the beginning stage now. The future of its technology relies on the getting of actual and effective data. Due to the characteristic of low-power, low-cost and high-performance, it has been applied popularly in the embedded systems today (Wang, 2009; Mei, 2008). By comparing with products alike inside and outside, we find that embedded systems based on ARM microprocessor have many advantages, such as portable, easy-using, flexible, cheaper etc.
Considering the actual demand of data acquisition in cropland, a portable data acquisition and communication system is designed based on the ARM (Zhou, 2010; Berger, 2010). It obtains the information from various sensors (Temperature/Humidity/attribute/diseases/insect pests) and GPS signal, analyses and processes the data, then stores them in the storage device or packs with TCP/IP protocol and transmits them to the data control center through WCDMA or Bluetooth. This paper will describe the design progress of this system.