This week, I did some more research on the specific types of sensors and equipment that we would need to physically build a greenhouse system. Since we need to send the sensor data and commands to the system over wifi, I looked into “smart” sensors and water irrigation systems that come with the capacity to connect to wifi, as well as ways to connect analog sensors to wifi using various equipment such as RPi, STM32, ESP32, Arduino Uno, etc. We needed to decide on how we were going to water the plants, so I did some research on the pros and cons of various watering systems such as sprinklers, drip irrigation, surface irrigation, etc.
We also took into consideration the feedback we got from our abstract and decided we needed a more quantitative requirement for our greenhouse. Using the research Sarah did on plants, specifically pea shoots, I came up with specific metrics (temp, soil moisture percentage, light intensity) to determine the success and effectiveness of the greenhouse.
Using the information I gathered on these topics, I created slides in the proposal presentation that had to do with the hardware and sensor systems of our project. Overall, we are on schedule to submit our proposal presentation slides on time and give our presentation next Tuesday.
Next week, I hope to narrow down the equipment that we need for our project by doing more research and receiving feedback from our proposal presentation. I plan on making a spreadsheet with specs and prices of the various components to make sure we have everything that we need within the budget. I also plan on looking up documentation and repos of similar projects that are online.