Monday, May 21, 2012

Garden project update 2 and 3 - Watering system 1


Early prototype of my gravity fed watering system. The valve is electronically controlled and currently is working with my test setup. Next will be to integrate it with the sensor monitoring system and have it actuate based on the current data being read in. I have an event that I'll be displaying a working(mostly) version tomorrow morning, so this evening will be filled with testing the logic and trying to get this in a mostly working form. All of the parts are there...and each works independently....


This is a wired up setup that I brought to the Pasadena engineering and Science expo. Unfortunately I didn't get the sensor (PCB)boards in time(they arrived in the post today)so I had to leave the sensor circuit in the breadboarded setup(which means lots of wires that make it look blah). I'm still using the Launchpad dev board until I can get the wireless setup buttoned down. Once I have it finalized, I'll be able to develop a circuit board that integrates all components in a nice clean fashion. The exciting part of this project was finishing some of the code that uses the sensor data to trigger the on/off switch that lets the water flow. I have to fine tune it at this point but the main part/point of the project is working.