Design a capacitive sensor for rapid monitoring of seed rate of sugarcane planter

Abstract

A capacitive sensor method for measuring billet spacing uniformity with sugarcane (Saccharum officinarm L.) billet planter is investigated in this paper.  Therefore, an electronic device based on capacitive sensor was designed and developed to predict the planting spacing of sugarcane billets.  It consisted of four components: a rectangular parallel plate capacitor, electronic circuitry, microcontroller, and display unit.  Accordingly, a prototype of the precision metering device for sugarcane billets was developed.  After calibrating the monitoring system, the results were verified with calibrated curve by means of linear regression and paired T-test.  The performance of the device, including quality of feed index (QFI), multiple index and miss index was investigated under laboratory conditions using a capacitive sensor and a test stand with camera system.  The results revealed that the forward speed had a significant effect on these variables.  The coefficient of variation was less than 3%, which indicated that billet spacing calculated via capacitive sensing method has no significant difference with the computed billet spacing via image processing method.

Keywords: capacitive system, sugarcane, compare monitoring, performance indices, precision planting