Development of Intelligent Logger Controller for Cotton Phenotyping

A typical cotton breeding program evaluates thousands of small field plots each year. Although cotton breeders make extensive field notes in an effort to collect data, the process is subjective and prone to a large degree of error. The efficiency of cotton breeding could be increased significantly, while minimizing cost, with the availability of more accurate methods of collecting information. High-thoughput phenotyping paved the development of large mapping populations but the current electronic data loggers/monitors used are not intended for these purposes. For example, the current data loggers, General Purpose Input/Output ports are mostly Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), the number of serial ports are limited, and they do not have the capability to connect new sensors’ communication protocol such as Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C), Controller Area Network (CAN) Bus or Serial Peripheral interface (SPI), thereby minimizing the use of newer sensors available on the market. The goal of this work is to design and develop a new data logger specifically to be used for cotton phenotyping, which incorporates multiple ADC lines, digital input/output lines, serial ports, I2C, CAN bus and SPI connections. This paper will present the design and development of the new data logger which makes use of Controller Area Network (CAN) Bus technology in connecting different sensors. The newly developed data logger provides seamless integration of all sensors used, expandability in terms of sensor connectivity with different communication protocol availability, and minimized wires that connect sensors and controllers. All this will pave the way for minimizing the work of breeders and instead help them focus more on processing their data.