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Weekly Reflections (SJ)
This week was a bit of a slow week for the project, as we were still working for a few elements out of our control to come into line. Due to the ongoing chip shortage, we were unable to procure one of the sensors we were really hoping to get, opting instead to buy a much more expensive, but available sensor suite. Connor and I went shopping to acquire building supplies to start our build as soon as we were assigned a space to do it in. A room in West Hall was provisioned to us, and Suzannah Erikson informed us that we would have access early this coming week. We also packaged up all of our currently running network equipment to prepare for the move into West Hall. This week we defiantly learned to roll with the punches and work with the conditions we had in order to keep our project moving toward a goal. We expect to get the building done in the next two weeks before the end of the sprint now that we have access.
This week was productive even though we are still waiting for parts to come. We were able to gain access to our space on campus, and move all of our equipment and networking devices into the space. We spent some time there this week getting our network infrastructure powered back up and organized, and began working on assembling and configuring our sensors. We are reaching back out to the AnyLeaf company that we hoped to buy sensors from before spending the bigger sum on proprietary software, in the hope of keeping our project more open source. However, if this is not possible, we are prepared to spend the money to get the project off the ground. I am beginning to tinker with Arduino coding languages and circuitry to test an alternative solution, so we are definitely acquiring some new skills through this project. I hope to at least have the base growing environment built this week. We may need to push some of the sensor stuff to next sprint unfortunately.
This week we were able to accomplish the majority of the purchasing and assembling of the physical growing setup for our build. We had to grab a bunch of PVC pipe and tubing, and do our own cuts and sanding. We got it done, and the system is mostly ready to begin getting integrated with the technology. I began the process of writing code to get our sensors working, which involved me learning from the ground up how to work with Raspberry Pi pinboards and circuits. Unfortunately, completing the sensors and installing them is being pushed back to next sprint, both because of waiting for parts and both of us being flooded with work. My goal is to have at least one working sensor package within the next week, at the minimum. This project is really going to challenge me to push outside my current knowledge set and expand my understanding of IOT, which isn't a topic I had much exposure to during my classwork.
This week Im really happy with the progress Connor and I have been able to make. Connor was able to finish the physical build to a state that will allow the sensors to be implemented, and I was able to get two of our sensors and two webcams working with the Mycodo software. We did not expect to be able to get this much progress this fast with the sensors, seeing how much trouble they were giving us earlier, but this now allows us to plan more things in our future timeline now that problems are freeing up more quickly that anticipated. I believe that we are on track to get the seedlings transferred by the end of the sprint.
This week we made several advancements for our project. Connor finished the drilling the holes in the PVC pipe for our growing setup, and I was able to finish implementing out flow sensor into the Pi. We received our new PH sensor in the mail, which uses an open cloud computing service called ThingSpeak to graph the data received by the unit. Upon further research onto ThingSpeak, we believe that it may be a good avenue to use in the stead of Mycodo, allowing us to free up the Pi computing power and allowing us to utilize THingSpeaks mobile app for remote sensor readouts. Best of all, our current sensors working with Mycodo would only need slight tweaks to their Python code in order to work with ThingSpeak. I believe that our next step in this project is to pursue a path of switching to ThingSpeak from Mycodo.
This week was the first step in a new direction. ThingSpeak has opened a few doors for us in this project but has also closed a few others. With the change comes dramatically better performance with viewing, editing, and processing the sensor data, due to the program not running on a Pi, as well as access to website integration and mobile apps. However, ThingSpeak closes down the path to direct automation in the system, for now anyway. There may be a way to do it with ThingSpeak React, the service that we will be using to generate the email alerts for the sensors, but that is going to take someone with a much more thorough understanding of programming and development than Connor and I have currently. I still believe that THingSpeak is the right way to go for now, if not our only path forward. Hopefully, someone in the future can pick up the project and give Mycodo another shot (the documentation is certainly all there.)
This week we achieved our goals of getting the sensors working and mostly implemented. We ran into a problem with our pump being too powerful and flooding the system when we implemented our flow sensor. A new one with an adjustable flow rate is in the mail. That should be the final piece of the puzzle to get this system up and running. I had to learn how to set up the complicated Arduino sensor this week, which required me to learn how to code in Arduino and flash the board and such. Lots of fun and learning.
This week was a great success. We are able to finalize the build and have it prepared to transplant the seedlings. They are in the tubes now and seem to be thriving! All of our sensors are working as intended and Things peak is working wonders. My current objecting is to get alerts up and running, possibly Twitter but most definitely email. Our meeting with GRF was a success, and I'm glad they are happy with our progress.
This week came with some successes and some failures. Our router got shut down by IS due to a problem with web traffic, however we believe that we fixed the issue. I was able to set up the email alerts, and now we are working on maintaining the growing environment and monitoring the growth. The plants are growing healthily and robustly. Hopefully the networking issue does not arise again. My next objective is to play around with ThingSpeak's Tweeting mechanic, and to see if we can get some kind of sharable data we can export and share.
This week was the first week that the grow setup truly ran by itself, without us shutting it down for one reason or another. The results have been very pleasing! The plants are healthy and strong, and we are rapidly approaching a harvest. The new seedlings are coming along nicely, and out focus has now gone to working on documentation in Ernest and polish. I'm very happy about how this project has progressed and am a little sad that it's coming to a close.
This week was the slowest week for the project, as we are in our monitor phase and waiting for a harvest. We have been working hard on documentation and fleshing out future paths for the project, as well as personally making contacts on the lower classes as potential candidates to carry the project forward into the future. Our next step forward is going to be an overhaul of accounts and passwords in the system to begin to scrub Connor and I's personal presence from the project, in order to instil a more universal account and password scheme to pass on to future project managers.
I cant believe that Capstone is over. Just about anyway. Its crazy how fast this has flown by and how successful our project has been. I'm really happy with how the plants have been growing, and how our systems have been working lately. Everything is working optimally, and we are on track to have an edible salad for the class on Thursday! Our final step is to create a presentation to show off our hard work, and show it to the class!