Shady Business

Green Light
Website
Wind Turbine
Logo

## Inspiration

Our inspiration for Shady Business was from one of our team members. She has a few plants in her dorm room that do not get sunlight. Her room has no window facing East or West and therefore, especially in the winter, her plants struggle to survive. NOT ANYMORE - as her troubles have inspired the need for a custom grow light powered by wind!

## What it does

We built a website hosted by GitHub, which allows a seamless interface between the user and the grow light (in theory). The Actual grow light is an LED strip controlled by a Pico Pi microcontroller.

The fun part is the mini turbine that becomes our generator to keep our plants and energy green!

## How we built it

The MechE team assembled the mini wind turbine and LED enclosure! The CompE team set up the wiring and Pico Pi and the CompSci team developed the UI!

## Challenges we ran into

The interfacing of the physical Pico Pi never budged, we couldn't find a way to serially port the COM3 of our computer and communicate with the Pico Pi from our main py file.

The MechE team faced manufacturing challenges working with wood and 3D printed parts. These small errors (i.e. the threads in the wind turbine rotor hub not printing as anticipated, poorly sized shaft couplers, or misaligned parts) led to an inefficient transmission of power from the wind turbine to the LED strip. With more time and precision, we believe our design could generate the five volts needed to fully power the Pico Pi.

The CompSci team faced the hardest challenge, interfacing with the Pico Pi and executing a functioning website.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

When we first saw light being produced by the power of the turbines, we were ecstatic. In fact, the first time we saw light after trying various LEDs and settling on a special LED strip we were super excited.

In the end, we had 3 functioning pieces that each portion of the team could be proud of!

## What we learned

Ideas are harder to put into practice than one thinks, literally. Our minds tend to oversimplify the minutia when in reality those pieces take a long time, exponentially increasing the difficulty.

Teamwork is so important! We wouldn't have accomplished or learned as much as we did without each other. Every member brought a different skill set but a shared enthusiasm to this project.

## What's next for Shady Business

The next step for the Shady Business team is lunch.