This is my first personal status update for the project, and so I will try to outline all of the work I’ve done on it so far. My capstone experience started out with several different issues regarding course logistics, and so I joined this group with Lucas quite late. We met and agreed to team up around two weeks ago, and began brainstorming shortly afterwards. As one may be able to tell, the MiGroBox was an idea that Lucas proposed to me, and, being a plant lover as well, I was immediately interested in the project.
As we began writing up the abstract and drafting the proposal slides, it became clear to me that Lucas’s vision was ambitious, to say the least. I think my biggest contribution in the first few days was slimming down the project to something that fit the scope of the course. I ended up laying out the structure of the slideshow so that we could really nail down the key ideas, and I also created the original system diagram. Lucas was the one presenting, so I offered a couple of talking points, but mostly let him do his thing on that front.
The following week we began researching our parts, plants, grow media, and all sort of other details so that we could submit a better set of requirements than the one that appeared in our proposal presentation. This was, for the most part, a joint effort that occurred in Zoom calls between the two of us, while we collaborated on notes. We also used this time to clarify our schedule a bit.
Since my focus is mostly in software, with some experience in web development, it falls naturally to me to design and implement the web application that will interface with our machine. This is what I will be focusing on in the immediate future, creating system diagrams for both the website and other parts of the project, and, afterwards, getting started on the skeleton of the web app.
I’m also going to be in charge of the control group for the plants. This isn’t a very technical part of the project, but it’s a critical one, because comparison to the control plants is the only way to prove the efficacy of our machine. If the goal of our project is to improve the experience of growing microgreens manually, then we will have to grow some manually as well to see how we did. We will be including my supplies for this in our first order, so that I can get started on that as soon as possible.
Looking further to the future, my experience in embedded systems design will help with the integration between the hardware and the software, and, additionally, I will be preparing to give the design presentation.
I’m excited about this project, because it involves a topic I am interested in outside of my academic life, and, frankly, Lucas’s passion for the project is downright contagious. It’s going to be a lot of fun to bring the MiGroBox to life!