My research unofficially began in April of 2015, when I took a class that Gull Lake no longer offers called iCloud Computing. It was the only computer science related class at the time, and so I signed up for it. In it I learned how to use a site named TinkerCAD and I used this knowledge to design and create many parts for this project.

TinkerCAD's design interface

Research

After Mr. Lange gave me the idea to make the automated system i started researching the sensors he gave me. I found the Vegetronix site and used that to program the algorithms to test the sensors. Using the Arduino Uno I hooked up the sensors and read their values on the Serial Display in the IDE. With a little tweaking we found a nice range of values being fed back to us.

Testing out the Sensors

The next part to research was the electrical valve. This part gave us issue directly from the start, being difficult to research given the documentation on the valve. Soon, however, we were able to get it working using a 12V battery and a N-Channel MOSFET. The battery required a 12V input to actuate, so we added the logic MOSFET to control the GND output and the open and closed circuit.

Version one of the Valve system

Once we figured out how all the sensors worked, we added a 4x20 line display to show off the sensor data and other data in the future. This took some tinkering to get it working. The first was the fact we needed a special library in the Arduino IDE in order to even write anything to the display. Next we needed to change the Baud settings on the back of the display or else it would screech and display really weird characters. Once we got that sorted out however it was easy to display everything we needed.

Initial test of the LCD display

Later on in the project Mr Lange requested that I add an LED Strip to the project as indicator lights. In order to accommodate the 12V LEDs I had to use the MOSFETs like earlier in the project for the valve. Using three of these MOSFETs I was able to control the Red, Green, and Blue outputs of the LEDs and create any color I desired.

Initial test of the LCD display

The last thing I have needed to research is the SD Card memory shield. The shield records any data we give it as an Excel spreadsheet. So as a test we hooked it up to the arduino and gave it some fake data and saw what the result was. The arduino handled it very well, recording the data as fast as we could give it. With only a 10 millisecond delay I was able to record 100 entries a second. So we found it was perfect for what we needed.

Adafruit's Memory Shield