H2Grow

A high-tech version of a baby monitor -- but for plants! Uses a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino to track hydroponically grown seeds through a variety of sensors and sends data to a website.

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Inspiration

I was inspired by my Digital Agriculture and Engineering class, where we are currently germinating/growing a wide variety of plants hydroponically. I wanted to build an automated system to keep track of how my plants are doing, especially since I forget things very easily!

What it does

How we built it

Currently, it utilizes water level sensors and a DHT22 (temperature and humidity) sensor to monitor the plants. This data is sent to an Arduino, which is then sent to a Raspberry Pi and logged in a csv file via PuTTY. There is also a strip of LED lights on the top that are acting as grow lights. They are on for 16 hours and off for 8 hours a day, but for demonstration purposes, this time has been shortened from hours to seconds. An override switch is attached to the lights if someone wants to keep the lights on. Additionally, there is a camera connected to the Pi, which takes a photo of the plants every five minutes. That photo is then displayed on a local HTML page.

Challenges we ran into

  • Camera suddenly stopped working out of the blue, tried several things before realizing the ribbon cable was broken. Hunted for replacement & luckily found one!
  • A lot of struggles with figuring out how PuTTY worked, getting it to start up on boot, etc.
  • Only outdated versions of Arduino IDE available on Raspberry Pi, ended up just programming the Arduino from another computer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Got most of what I wanted to build done
  • Neat enclosure that traps more water vapor, good for plants!
  • Used a lot of different skills
  • Learned more about Raspberry Pi and Arduino in the process
  • Calibrated water sensors manually

What we learned

  • How to connect Arduino to Raspberry Pi
  • How to build a working prototype
  • Safe circuitry vs. unsafe circuitry
  • Re-planning a LOT

What's next for H2Grow

  • Build server so webpage is accessible remotely
  • Put data from sensor onto webpage
  • Graph data / download data options
  • Remote control of LEDs through server
  • Possible machine learning aspect with photo recognition
  • Kit-ify project, so others can easily build it too for homes/classrooms/etc.
  • Send warnings to phone/website/LCD screen (?) when water level is low or temp/humidity is at a bad level for the plants (manual calibration for those)
  • Hopefully continue as a project in other classes (Digital Agriculture and possibly Machine Learning as well)
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