Indoor/Outdoor Distributed Ag

A low-cost platform for distributed control of both indoor and outdoor agriculture

Aleks Clark

Following Follow project

Liked Like project

Become a Hackaday.io member

Just one more thing

To make the experience fit your profile, pick a username and tell us what interests you.

OK, I'm done! Skip

Similar projects worth following

The 2015 Hackaday Prize

View Gallery

Description

I have both indoor and outdoor plants, and need to manage them both. Indoor plants need a high sensor density (per square foot there are more, smaller plants), and outdoor plants need longer range. But everything should speak a single protocol and be manageable from anywhere.

Details

The Tiva C series launchpads have a very desirable feature, in that they are cheap and come with ethernet. Wireless is all the rage, sure, but I much prefer to wire things in where possible. That, coupled with the fact that I can use common code between different flavors of launchpads means I can develop libraries that function identically despite the varied needs of the project

Components

1 × MSP430G2231 Microprocessors, Microcontrollers, DSPs / ARM, RISC-Based Microcontrollers
1 × XM4C129 Microprocessors, Microcontrollers, DSPs / ARM, RISC-Based Microcontrollers
1 × ESP8266
1 × 2x14 LCD
1 × i2c LCD controller

Project Logs

Collapse

Megatron, Assemble
Aleks Clark • 06/29/2015 at 13:56 • 0 comments

Ok, so parts have been sourced:

I've mounted the big launchpad inside this handy case, since there is some travel in my future I should be able to take all of this with me and develop the protocol while I wait for the humidity/temp sensors to arrive. The water dispensing part of the build is going to need a hard look, as pumps are expensive, and solenoids are as well (at least at the indoor density levels I'm anticipating).
One possible solution would be to monitor humidity individually, but dispense water in groups. The software could detect clogs/failures by alerting if humidity didn't rise in all plants following a watering.