VaCAVEtion

Inspiration

The theme was Futuristic Caveman, so we wanted to help the Cavemen around the world by opening another source of food and giving them automatic agriculture.

What it does

Our machine detects soil moisture content, and when the plant needs water it will water itself. It is also connected to an app that gives you information on the current moisture content so you can view it even when you are not at your cave.

How we built it

We have a Pi that is connected to a moisture sensor in order to measure the moister levels in the soil, and when the levels drop below a certain threshold it will self water using a pump. Our Pi also feeds data to a mobile app through a Flask backend and Flutter front end to display the needed information.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a significant number of hardware problems. Our biggest issue was the arduino we were going to use to control the pump, moisture sensors, etc. was not able to run any new code due to a faulty boot loader. We, with the help of three mentors, spent several hours trying to fix it but were unable to. Because our intended controller didn't work, we were unprepared and that led to a cascade of other problems such as not having multiple relays to monitor multiple sensors and having to use different Pi's and creative solutions to have the needed functionality. Our sensors were also slightly faulty because we couldn't control the current flowing through the sensor, and it led to the straining of the sensors from constant current.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our ability to adapt to the challenges we face, because we had to use completely different electronics that didn't necessarily have everything we needed, and by using them together we could get the functionality needed.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how code is stored on a micro controller, how to pivot and use different electronics, how to create mobile apps using the Flutter framework and dart language, and, most importantly, how to integrate hardware and software together.

What's next for VaCAVEtion

Next we would like to fix our broken arduino board and use it to connect the pump. We would also like to include more sensors to allow for many different plants, simplify and clean up the hardware to make it more efficient, and offer more QOL updates such as being able to manually pump from the app if need be.