Smart Plant Pot

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  Here's an image of our project!

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by our desire to help a niche group of individuals, botanists and other small self-sufficient agriculture farmers around the world. Our goal is to create a simple, yet efficient design that increases their quality of life.

What it does

Our project is automated to detect for moisture in soil and execute an action. When the moisture in the soil depletes, our circuit will send feedback to turn on an LED and activate a pump motor to release water into the plant. Also, when the water source is depleted, the pump motor will not run.

How we built it

Our project design is purely analog. We utilized a breadboard and transistors, resistors, capacitors, op-amps, and analog ICs for our design. We did NOT use an Arduino or any forms of coding to challenge ourselves with a purely physical product.

Challenges we ran into

Our lack of resources led us to utilizing abstract resources like scrap soda cans and a gear motor instead of a real water pump.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of piecing together our project in a purely analog style using readily available electronic components and scrap materials.

What we learned

We learned how to use a breadboard with adequate wires and pieces. We also learned how to simplify our project by using a battery-powered analog style circuit.

What's next for Smart Plant Pot

Our next goal is to create a design that can be practically replicated for consumer use. We can also branch on our idea to a larger scale so that large scale agriculture farmers can connect their irrigation systems and solar panels to our design. To do so, we will assemble our circuit on a printed-circuit board (PCB) instead of on a breadboard and use components with higher power ratings to control more powerful pumps.

Note Because we didn't have an actual pump we used a motor to represent the pump!

Built With

• a/c-adaptor
• actuator-motor
• analog-ic
• breadboard
• capacitors
• english
• jumper-wire
• leds
• multimeter
• opamp
• plant
• potentiometer
• resistors
• soil
• telugu
• transistor
• vietnamese