Universal detecting terminal for farmland information based on ARM and android

In order to improve the detection performance on the increasing complex and diverse farmland information, a portable and configurable farmland information detection terminal was developed using a solution of high performed software and hardware based on the notion of universal design. An all-in-one framework which combines the mainstream embedded processor of ARM Cortex-A8 S5PV21 and the popular Android 4.0 operating system was adopted in this device. The key interfaces and modules include sensor interfaces of AD/232/485/USB, human-machine interaction modules of push-button/multi point capacitive touch screen/HD IPS LCD screen, data exchange modules of SD Card/USB/3G/WiFi/Bluetooth, dual mode positioning module of Beidou/GPS, and power supply/electric meter module. The core drivers, HAL library & JNI interfaces layer were customized or translated in the software to facilitate software development. Test and application showed that the proposed terminal was successfully configured with options of multiple sensors, such as analog/digital, current/voltage and video/image cameras, which demonstrated good capability of acquiring information on the soil and atmospheric parameters, crop images and geography, and had rich functionality of data presentation and exchange with multiple modes. The detection error of analog signal was less than 0.669 5%, the download rate of 3G wireless communication was as fast as 1 248 Kb/s, and the maximum power consumption of the whole device was less than 3.6 W. The outline dimension was 152 mm×83 mm×34 mm, and the weight was only 330 g. The detection terminal was easy in configuration, or in secondary development, and can be conveniently applied in farmland. The proposed terminal fully meets the need of farmland information acquisition in terms of comprehensiveness, high efficiency and accuracy.