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Senior Design Team sdmay22-25 • Smart Garden Monitoring System

Problem Statement:

Growing plants can be not only a time consuming task, but a very sensitive one as well. With our smart garden monitoring system, we hope to automate as much of the plant growing process as feasibly possible in order to make it more consistent and manageable for the user. Doing so will save time and money, and will in turn make growing plants a more accessible task for a wide range of potential users. So our goal was to make a prototype for a smart relatively affordable greenhouse.

Solution Overview:

This project was preposed by an Iowa State student. As such we were not assigned a client. This allowed the scope of this project to be as wide as our imaginations. The goal was to obtain a product with the ability to take care of a plant from seed to harvest with minimal effort by the user. In order to achieve this we separated the functions of this project into sections. The project consists of three main sections: the hardware, the software, and the communication between them. In order to divide up the work, a team was assigned to each section with some overlap.

Hardware:

The top priority of the hardware team was building the greenhouse. Several wooden planks were screwed and glued together and treated to keep out moisture. The top of the wooden frame was covered with sprayfoam to insulate the greenhouse. The sides were surronded in clear plastic tarps and secured to the frame with calk. The wooden greenhouse structure contained a fan, a light, a water pump system, and temperature sensors. All of these components connected up to a Rasberry Pi.

Software:

The top priority of the software team was the website application. This showed the user how each plant was doing as well as providing the controls to the hardware. The main page showed each plant and a base set of data. The data page showed tables and graphs of all the information given by the Raspberry Pi on the database. The controls page allows the user to set automatic timers for the hardware to run and manual switches.

Communication:

The top priority of the communication team was to obtain data from the hardware with the Rasberry Pi and populate the database with it. The database was hosted through a free AWS server. Any commands from the user application were to be sent to the Rasberry Pi.