The Handheld Plant Spectroscope

Overview

Plants make up over 80% of the Earth's biomass. Monitoring their health status is important to understand environmental changes as well as an extremely useful tool in the world of agriculture. Plant health can be correlated to the concentration of chloroph yll which determines the absorption spectrum of plants. The spectral characteristic of vegetation can be characterized with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The NDVI measures the contrast between light reflected in the red and in the infrared, resulting in an index value in the range between -1 and 1. This device is already well known and accurate; however it is very costly. The NDVI index is typically considered for multi -spectral imaging devices. The device that has been designed is The Handheld Plant Spectroscope. This device is essentially an extremely low cost NDVI device that is handheld, works in close proximity to plants, allows active illumination using spectral selectivity achieved via a set of Arduino software and based red, green, blue, and infrared LED lights with specific wavelength and is equipped with a TSL2591 Light Sensor with large dynamic range to collect data. The function of the device was tested by monitoring sage plants which received different amounts of water. The results showed that the device readings correlate qualitatively with visible differences in the health status of the plants. The entire device co sts less than 50 USD, making it extremely cost efficient in comparison to other devices that are already established in the monitoring of plant health.

Competition history

• JSHS 2024 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

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