1plant MKI

1plant is an automated plant care system which waters your plant and provides it with UV light when dark out. The ability to take care of your plants autonomously will ensure their health.

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Heading 1Plant MKI

What it does

Throughout the past 24h, my colleague and I have designed and built a hardware system capable of automating the growth of various plants. Using different sensors for UV detection and soil moisture, we determined when the plant needed light and when it needed water.

Inspiration

Automating plant growing systems have always been an interest of ours, and with our electrical engineering background, this idea was a no-brainer.

How we built it

The process of building this prototype was quite intricate. We started by making a list of the required steps and different parts that needed to work and separated the work evenly. Once we could make each component work individually, we put everything together and added the missing lines of code in the Arduino software. Once the hardware was all set and working, we started building the wooden box with the few tools we had; a hand saw, a drill, a couple of nails and a hammer. Now that the Box was built, all there was left was installing the electronics inside and attached the UV LEDs and the water tube.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the night, we ran into many issues. Firstly, we needed to build a box to house our electronics. We figured that a hardware store would have what we needed, but when we visited our local Home Hardware, we found it to be closed. To get our tools and materials, we had to travel to another part of town and pick up the supplies from Jules' parent's place. (Even then, they had a small supply of tools, so we had to build the box using only a handsaw, a drill and a hammer).

Next, we ran into irregularities in our system. We narrowed it down to an issue with the code that controlled the motor, but this part worked once we fixed it. However, getting the circuits to fit into the box proved a challenge, as many wires came loose. This made the system malfunction and required deep analysis of our wiring situation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this is our first hardware hackathon, we are quite proud of our ability to teamwork and build this project on the weekend. We both did not think we could build something useful in such a short amount of time, but we proved to ourselves that we could. This got us quite excited, and we are looking forward to working together in future hackathons.

What we learned

We learned that delegation of tasks is of critical importance when it comes to building something quickly. There are parts of the system that Vasily exclusively worked on and parts of the system that Jules exclusively worked on. Once it came time to assemble the entire project, we quickly explained what our parts did and then assembled the project fully.

What's next for 1plant MKI

As mentioned in our video, looking forward, we are planning on adding pH sensors and nutrient sensors to optimize plant growth further. Furthermore, we plan on adding more UV LEDs.

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