This week I worked with Jana in setting up the blackout film for the windows, as well as bought more plants for the greenhouse. Personally, I finished setting up the heater and watering system for the plants. As the plants don’t seem to be absorbing enough water as of now, I am experimenting with different ways of raising the water source as well as pre-watering the plant to make sure the plant watering ropes are working as intended. I have also tested for sensor accuracy and started testing the actuator accuracy (in particular, the heater response), and measured the sensor-to-web latency. For a fun side part, I am also adding an LED matrix connected by an Arduino to the front of the system to represent the status of actuators in the greenhouse, and have mostly completed the code for this.
Progress is now on schedule, and by the final week, I just need to secure the heater and test the stabilization times for all the actuators in the greenhouse, as well as finish all the testing. Throughout the project, as I did not have much previous experience in embedded systems, I learnt a lot implementing the different hardware in the system. I learnt mostly about different communication protocols I had to implement, including MQTT, and serial communication (between RPi and Arduino as well as through the RS485 method). For implementing all the hardware, I found myself mostly reading documentation, following articles of similar projects, as well as watching youtube videos of tutorials of simple parts.
