F5 - 1 2011 International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Informatics

17-19 July 2011, Bandung, Indonesia

Microcontroller Based Environmental Control for

Swiftlet Nesting with SMS Notification
Djunaidi Tristanto1 and Henri P. Uranus2
Graduate Program in Electrical Engineering, University of Pelita Harapan
Plaza Semanggi, Jl. Jend. Sudirman Kav. 50, Jakarta 12930, Indonesia
1
djundjun81@gmail.com
2
h.p.uranus@staff.uph.edu

Abstract— Swiftlet nests naturally have a high economic value,
and hence attract many attentions. Traditional swiftlet nesting
generally incorporates manual environmental control. The
nesting house’s guard might forget or fail to control the
environment for many reasons. In this work, a microcontroller
based system that will automatically control the temperature and
humidity of the nesting house to a condition convenient for the
swiftlets were developed. The controller is connected to a
monitoring computer which can be 45 m away. The computer
will report the status and alarm remotely by sending SMS to the
guard and the owner of the nesting house in certain
circumstances. A miniature model was made for this
development. Functionality and performance of the system were
studied on this model. The performance of the sensor as key part
of the developed system was verified to commercial instruments.
The characteristics of the system were analyzed to obtain the
relationship between water that put into the nesting house with
the temperature and humidity. A scaling rule is proposed for
utilizing the experimental results for applications in realistic
nesting houses.
Keywords— Swiftlet nesting, microcontroller, SMS
temperature sensor, humidity sensor.
I. INTRODUCTION
Swiftlet nests naturally have a high economic value, and
hence attract many attentions. Swiftlets like to live and make
nests at places that has certain relative humidity and
dynamics of those parameters still remain as interesting
aspects to be studied.
In this work, we propose a microcontroller based system
for keeping the humidity and temperature of a nesting house
to make the swiftlets feel at home. In addition to automatic
environmental control, the system also includes remote status
reporting and alarm notification to guard(s) and owner
through short message services (SMS). This is performed
through a monitoring computer connected to the controller
unit.
We constructed a miniature model of the system.
Functionality and performance of the system were studied on
this model. The performance of the sensor as key part of the
developed system was verified to commercial instruments.
The characteristics of the system were analyzed to obtain the
relationship between water that put into the nest house model
with the temperature and humidity. A scaling rule is proposed
for utilizing the experimental results for applications in
realistic nesting houses.
alert,
HEATER
COOLER
BLOWER
FOG GER SMS
switch
COM port
= HEATER

temperature, i.e. 80-95 % RH and 22-28°C [1], [2] in addition SDA SERIAL CABLE
MONITORING
COMPUTER
= COOLER

to darkness. A study on environmental parameters for swiftlet = BLOWER

nesting was already reported in literature [3]. It is clear that, a SCL

= FOGGER

controlled environment is of importance for swiftlet nesting. TEMP AND

HUMID
MICRO

Controlling environmental parameters like temperature and SENSOR

relative humidity can be performed by microcontroller system
[4], [5]. Commercial controllers for such parameters are also
available [6], [7]. However, most of the commercial products
are not integrated (hence several controllers are needed to
control several environmental parameters separately) and do
not make use of telecommunication technology (hence lack of
remote early warning and status notification feature). While a
microcontroller-based environmental control system sounds
straight-forward, the relation between water put into the
nesting house with humidity and temperature as well as the
CONTROLLER
ATMEGA 8535
Fig. 1 The diagram of the proposed nesting house environmental control
system.
II. SYSTEM DESIGN
The proposed system as shown in Fig. 1, consists of sensors
and actuators controlled by a microcontroller system. In the
field implementation in the future; heater, cooler, blower, and
fogger machines can be used as the actuators. But, in our
miniature model, the activation of such machines will be
indicated by LEDs. The controller unit is connected to a

978-1-4577-0752-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

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monitoring computer, from which the nesting house’s guard C. Software of the Monitoring Computer
can monitor the environment status and logged data. The The software of the monitoring computer was developed.
computer is also connected to a mobile phone which will This program sends queries to the controller unit, displays and
automatically send alarm notification in form of short message logs the humidity and temperature readout on its screen. If the
service (SMS) to the guard’s and owner’s phone in case of temperature or humidity readout is outside a desired range of
certain conditions. values, a corresponding alarm message will be sent out to the
A. Hardware of the Controller Unit mobile phones of guard and/or owner. The sender mobile
phone was connected to the computer through a USB data
Fig. 2 shows the schematic diagram of the controller unit, cable and its modem driver, so that it can be accessed by the
which is adopted from a commercial MCU development board computer software through standard serial communication
[8]. The controller unit is based on ATMega8535 MCU [9]. A port (the COM port). ETSI’s standard AT commands [12] was
Sensirion’s SHT11 [10] chip is used for sensing the humidity used for sending the SMS.
and temperature and connected through two-wire interface
(TWI) to ports PA.0 and PA.1 of the microcontroller. LEDs
driven by ports PC.4 to PC.7 indicate the activation of heater,
cooler, blower, and fogger, respectively, while LEDs driven
by ports PC.2 and PC.3 were used for alarm if humidity or
temperature of the nesting house is outsite the desired range.
Transistors Q1 and Q2 and their associated components form
a level translator for RS232 interfacing to the monitoring
computer.
B. Software of the Controller Unit
The firmware for the controller unit was coded using
CodeVision’s C [11] language, cross-compiled, and
downloaded into the MCU’s internal flash memory through
the in-circuit programming (ISP) mechanism of the MCU.
The firmware handles TWI communication to readout the
sensors, responding to queries from the monitoring computer,
and controlling the temperature and humidity through an on-
off controller mechanism by activating/deactivating the heater,
Fig. 3 The photograph of the model of the swiftlet nesting house and the
cooler, fogger and blower. In the miniature model, these monitoring computer.
actuators are represented by LEDs.
A miniature model of a swiftlet nesting house with size of
15 cm × 15 cm × 20 cm was constructed using glass plates.
The controller unit was connected to a sensor head which was
installed in the model. The controller unit was connected to
the monitoring computer. The photograph of the model and
monitoring computer is shown in Fig. 3. Our measurement
and experiments showed that the sensor head can be
connected through a flat cable of length up to 15 m away from
the controller while the controller itself still can communicate
with the monitoring computer with a cable of up to 45 m long.

III. MEASUREMENTS AND ANALYSIS

A number of measurements were performed on the
constructed model to study the dynamics of temperature and
humidity in the model chamber as a certain amount of water
was put into the chamber. Comparison of the sensor readouts
with commercial measuring equipments was also performed.
Note that, although in real field implementation, the water will
normally be converted into vapor by the use of fogger and
blower machines, in our present experiments, we let the water
to evaporize naturally.

Fig. 2 The schematic diagram of the controller unit.

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A. Comparison of sensor readout with commercial measuring
equipments
Certain amount of water was put into the model chamber
and after 5 minutes, the readout was noted. These procedure
was performed also using commercial measuring equipments,
i.e. ADITE and EXTECH [13] humidity/temperature meters.
The humidity and temperature of room when the experiments
were carried out was 39 % RH and 30.4 ˚C. Fig. 4 shows the
results for temperature readout while Fig. 5 for humidity
readout of the three equipments.
Fig. 4 Measured temperature in the model chamber as function of water put
in after 5 minutes for the constructed system and commercial meters. DTS is
the developed system.
Fig. 5 Measured relative humidity in the model chamber as function of water
put in after 5 minutes for the constructed system and commercial meters. DTS
is the developed system.
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As shown in the figures, the readout of our sensor (denoted
as DTS in the figures) is smoother and hence has better
resolution than the commercial meters. The absolute values of
temperature for the three measuring equipments show around
1 ˚C of discrepancies, although their trend agree each other.
Considering that, for swiftlet nesting, the range of desired
temperature is quite large, we note that such slight inaccuracy
does not matter so much. The humidity values of the three
equipments roughly agree each other. The results show that
the temperature of the chamber decreases slightly by the
amount of water put into the chamber due to the evaporative
cooling effect since the evaporation of water takes thermal
energy from the chamber. The developed system best fits to
⎛ V ⎞
T = 1.45exp ⎜ − water ⎟ + 28.97 (1)
⎝ 45.44 ⎠
with T and Vwater denoting the chamber temperature in ˚C and
water volume in ml, respectively. Meanwhile, the humidity of
the chamber increases monotonically by water volume
following a best fit model of
H = 50.41 ⎡⎣1 − exp ( −0.54Vair )⎤⎦ + 35.89 (2)
with H is the relative humidity in % RH. These results
indicate that temperature can only be decreases for less than 2
˚C by putting water in the chamber which shows the
importance of using cooler instead of water for a safe
temperature decrement.
B. Dynamics of temperature and humidity
As a certain amount of water was put into the chamber, the
dynamics of changes of chamber temperature and humidity
are also interesting to be observed as it gives information on
how long does it takes to achieve a certain set-point and will
be useful for the design of controller algorithm, if in the future
more advanced controller algorithm than the present on-off
controller is expected. Fig. 6 and 7 shows such dynamics for
water of 2.5 ml. Note that these experiments were performed
at different start-up room humidity and temperature than for
the previous curves.

Fig. 6 The dynamics of chamber temperature if 2.5 ml of water was put into
the chamber.
Fig. 7 The dynamics of chamber relative humidity for 2.5 ml of water put
into the chamber.
IV. SCALING TO A REALISTIC NESTING HOUSE
In order to make the results on miniature model applicable
for realistic nesting house, we propose a volume scaling rules
V [1]
Vwater,r = bh,r Vwater,m (3)
Vbh,m
with Vwater,r and Vwater,m denoting the required water to be
fogged in the realistic and miniature model, respectively,
while Vbh,r and Vbh,m denoting the volume of the chamber or
room of the realistic and miniature model of the nesting
houses, respectively. This formula can be intuitively
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understood through the definition of the term relative
humidity itself. Since the relative humidity is defined as the
ratio of water vapor’s partial pressure to its saturation pressure
at respective temperature [14]; using the ideal gas law, it is
clear that in order to keep the pressure (and hence the relative
humidity) for an enlarged volume (i.e. the nesting house
room’s volume), the amount of substance (i.e. the water to be
fogged) should scale up according to the room’s upscaling.
As an example, Fig. 8 shows that following Eq. (2), in order
to increase the relative humidity to 80 %RH from a typical
daytime 39 %RH in the miniature model with size of 15 cm ×
15 cm × 20 cm (volume of 4500 cm3), we need water with
volume of 3.85 ml. Then, for a realistic nesting house of 5 m ×
10 m × 3 m (volume of 150 m3), the amount of water needed
to be fogged to reach the desired humidity will be (150
m3/4500 cm3)×3.85 ml = 128 l.
80
Humidity (% RH)
70
yi vs. xi
60
fit 2
50 3.85 ml
40
H=50,41(1-exp(-0,54 Vair ) %RH+ 35,89 %RH
30
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
Water volume (ml)
Fig. 8 The amount of water needed to be fogged into the miniature model
nesting house for volume scaling applications to a realistic nesting house.
V. CONCLUSIONS
We report the design of a microcontroller based
temperature and humidity control system for a swiftlet nesting
house. The system is equiped with remote alarm notification
using SMS messaging. The system is developed and
characterized on a developed miniature model. A scaling rule
was proposed for the utilization of the results to a realistic
nesting house.
REFERENCES
Private communication with Mr. Effendi, a swiftlet nesting house
farmer, Ketapang, Western Kalimantan, Indonesia.
[2] http://ngraho.com/2008/01/01/ternak-burung-walet/
[3] Ibrahim S. H., Teo W. C., and Baharun A., “A study on suitable habitat
for swiftlet farming,” UNIMAS e-Journal of Civil Eng., Vol. 1, No. 1,
pp. 1-7, 2009.
[4] I. Güller and M. Burunkaya, “Humidity control of an incubator using
the microcontroller-based active humidifer system employing an
 ultrasonic nebulizer,” J. Medical Engineering & Technology, Vol. 26, [9] http://www.atmel.com
No. 2, pages 82 – 88, 2002. [10] http://www.sensirion.com
[5] D. Ibrahim “Teaching digital control using a low-cost microcontroller- [11] http://www.codevision.biz
based temperature control kit”, Int. J. Electrical Eng. Edu., Vol. 40, No. [12] http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/specs/html-info/27005.htm
3, pp. 175-187, 2003. [13] http://www.extech.com
[6] http;//www.leeheng.com.my [14] Z. M. Rittersma, “Recent achievements in miniaturised humidity
[7] http://www.konghengswiftlets.com sensors: review of transduction techniques,” Sensors and Actuators A:
[8] http://www.innovativeelectronics.com/ Physical, Vol. 96, No. 2-3, pp. 196-210, 2002.

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