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Background and History
Hydroponics has a surprisingly long history dating back to at leas the ancient Egyptians where you can see images depicting plants being grown in containers. Growing plants in containers has been something seen all through out history with what we would call hydroponics now emerging in the 1970s. Hydroponics has since grown in popularity as both a pop culture icon and a valid form of food production.
Our remote monitoring system uses a number of sensors that inform us of the growing conditions. We are also using a webcam to monitor the growing visually. The history of the webcam is much like this project. People were to lazy to manually check a pot of coffee so they built something that allowed them to watch it from a distance and so the webcam was born. This project is based around the idea of reducing physical efforts associated with hydroponics.
Hydroponics have become more and more popular in recent years as the climate crisis is showing the need for alternative sustainable sources of food. Singapore has been one of the world leaders in high tech hydroponics. This is really the aspect of our project that allows us to tap into our IT knowledge and play around with automation and remote monitoring.
The IoT side of this project is really rather awesome there are so many different pieces of technology that come together to form the final product. The Raspberry Pi's are backbone of our computing and monitoring elements. Our project relies on a program called mycodo that takes inputs and then provides us the ability to output to controllers to aid us in the growing process. Mycodo is open source and was developed specifically for use in hydroponics. We came across many different builds combining IoT devices and hydroponics that can all be found here in our research section. There are tons of hobbyist doing things similar things to our project but we will be building our own growing system and monitor it in a way that lets us make the most of our networking and IT knowledge.
Our research can all be found here. It covers both the hydroponic growing side as well as the IoT aspects of our project.