Automatic Wick Irrigation Community Garden System

Inspiration

We got our inspiration from learning about how plants can self water themselves through string irrigation and that’s it’s the most frequently used methods people use to water their plants while they’re out traveling.

What it does

The Automatic Wick Irrigation Community Garden System (AWICGS) uses wick irrigation and smart sensors to properly irrigate plants while monitoring system functions and readiness.

How we built it

The irrigation system idea was originally conceptualized in an engineering design notebook. The original idea was a UVA hanging apartment garden that utilized string irrigation so students and faculty members would not have to water the plants. To tackle the sustainability aspect of this prompt, we expanded the original design to incorporate the self-composting system as well as the mechanical aspects of the design. With the addition of the camera, float sensor, and Arduino microcontroller, we were able to expand this project to make it more self-sustainable and computer science based.

Challenges we ran into

We are all first years at the University of Virginia, and have very little coding experience or expertise. Furthermore, this is our very first hackathon, so we were somewhat surprised by the amount of time (or lack thereof) we had to fully code and design our project. Our team also had to work remotely, which further exacerbated our issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the above challenges, we were able to adapt to our situation, and by playing off each others' strengths and weaknesses, we were able to come together as a team and design the AWICGS.

What we learned

One of the biggest things we learned was how to properly discover and work with each other's capabilities, especially when it comes to delegating and fairly distributing tasks. We also formed our team on Saturday morning, so we learned a great deal about how to quickly group together around a common goal and work towards it posthaste.

What's next for Automatic Wick Irrigation Community Garden System

The next steps for our project would be developing a web/phone application to go along with the system so that whoever wants to access data about the garden can do so in an easy and user friendly way.