Design and Implementation of Portable Multifunctional Data Acquisition Terminal

Precision agriculture, a modern agriculture system, is a good solution for the implementation of pollution-free agricultural program. The start point of precision agriculture is the collection of agricultural growth data, but it is not an easy job as the APB (Agricultural Production Base) is always far away from city center and located remotely. As a result, the APB is hard to be covered by network, and an online data collection method takes no effects. Besides, acquisition work may last for a long time in field, so the terminal must be long duration without direct power supply. Aiming at these requests, this paper presents a PMDAT (Portable Multifunction Data Acquisition Terminal) based on ARM, which supports not only online data collection, but also supports offline data collection. When network is not available, PMDAT launches an embedded application to support working offline and stores the offline collected data in terminal temporary; when network is available, PMDAT first uploads the offline collected data automatically and updates itself to maintain consistent basic information of APB with Data Center, then launches an embedded browser to support collecting data online. In addition, in order to support working in field for long time, we integrate a powerful rechargeable battery into PMDAT, and pay attention to low power consumption design. This is a new approach to meet practical needs very well.