Internet of things (IoT) based postharvest technology to improve the ripening process of Banana fruits. Case study: Smart Urwina

Abstract

Banana is most consumable fruit all over the world, in Rwanda banana harvested each season is used in banana wine and juice production .Unfortunately, 90% of ripening process is done traditionally or manually, where green bananas are hanging up or burying underground to generate the required temperature for ripening. This research project entitled Internet of things (IoT) based postharvest technology to improve the ripening process of Banana fruits is designed to implement an IOT pre-programmable system designed to ripen banana appropriately, our case study “Smart Urwina” which simply means the place where bananas are kept to get ripen, it is a full monitored and controlled solution to enhance the smoothness of banana ripening by reducing loss that occasionally occur in traditional method due to unsafe underground yard. This thesis aims to develop a smart monitoring system to facilitate the ripening process and make it successful with minimum human intervention. The system will be equipped with actuators and sensors capable of providing and measuring every single factor that may have impact on the ripening process of bananas such as Temperature, Humidity, Ethylene Gaz, C02 and air circulation. The system will process those data locally and then it will send aggregated data to the cloud for further analytics. MariaDB database has used for data storing. In Addition, an IoT based system was successfully built and linked with an interactive dashboard to visualize results of ripening process , this through Node-red platform via Smartphone, tablet, or PC and at the end the multivariate linear regression machine learning technique has been used to analyses multiple data variables and prediction purpose