Jacob L.

Smart Garden

Engineer	School	Area of Interest	Grade
Jacob L.	SAR Highschool	Biological Engineering	Rising Junior

FINAL MILESTONE

My final milestone was redesigning the dashboard for the smart garden. After facing setbacks with the original dashboard, I decided to jump ship and start something new. I found an IoT display called Thingspeak that works very well with microcontrollers such as the Arduino mkr1000.

SECOND MILESTONE

My second milestone for the Smart Garden is getting the internet dashboard up and running. The dashboard is programmed with Node.js, which is just JavaScript, but run on the computer itself, instead of in a browser, which is how normal JavaScript is run. It also uses Johnny-Five to help read the inputs from the sensors connected to the Arduino.

This is the dashboard. Since there is no input (yet), the values shown are just the default values. The data is also logged on a timeline on the bottom half of the screen.

FIRST MILESTONE

My First Milestone for the Smart Garden is making sure that all of my sensors work (spoiler alert: they didn’t for a while). I tested that each sensor reacted to stimuli by running a sample serial.print code that showed the raw output of each of the sensors.

This is the AM2302 temperature and humidity sensor.

This is the testing code for the AM2302. It is a bit more complicated than the other testing codes I used for the other sensors, because this one included formatting that resulted in the actual temperature being printed instead of just a set of numbers between 0 and 1023.

This is the serial monitor. It prints the data coming from the sensor. The data reacts to the changes in temperature and humidity, as shown by the slight differences between each reading.

This is the moisture sensor. The two prongs will be wedged into the soil to detect the moisture levels of the soil.

This is the testing code for the moisture sensor. It simply takes the input of the moisture sensor and prints it on the serial monitor. There is also an if statement that blinks an LED whenever the sensor is above a certain threshold in order to remind the user that the plant is dry and needs water.

This is the serial monitor for the moisture sensor. The lower the value, the more moisture is being sensed

This is the photoresistor. It detects levels of light.

This is the testing code for the photoresistor. It is the most simple code by far, at only 8 lines of text. The only thing it does is print the readings from the photoresistor.

STARTER PROJECT

My Starter Project is the Useless Machine, a machine that, when turned on, turns itself off. I enjoyed this project because I learned how to solder, and it was relatively easy.

HOW IT WORKS

The Useless Machine is powered by three AA batteries. The switch, when turned on, switches the polarity of a motor connected to an arm, causing it to rotate towards the switch. Once it flips the switch, the polarity of the motor is reversed, causing the arm to retract. eventually, the arm hits a snap switch, which stops the motor. There is also an LED that lights up when the motor is active. Some problems I encountered were the LED not working properly due to the fact that I fried one of the anodes. Another problem that I ran into was assembling the box. The rods that I was supposed to screw the plates onto were not actually drilled for screws, so I had to engrave the grooves for the screws myself.