This project aims to reduce urban food insecurity by reducing the cost and labour requirements of monitoring aquaponic or hydroponic food-growing systems. Designed specifically for hobbyist or small-scale growers, our project monitors critical system variables such as pH, temperature, and water-level and provides autonomous control. Critical notifications, real-time information, control settings, and system-history is available to users on a mobile application.
Our work contributes a low-cost, open-source hardware design, and IoT development framework that will allow hobbyists to expand and modify the system for their own needs. By simplifying the communication protocols, growers can focus on adding new sensors instead of worrying about data-security.
Our system can also operate on battery power in the event of a power-outage, a critical failure in aquaponic systems. This feature allows growers to be notified and to begin to take corrective action within the minute of the outage.
Contains key documents describing our project. This includes the following (in the docs/ folder):
- System Installation
- User Manual
- Requirements
- Design
- Verification and Validation
Please consult those documents for more information about the project.
It also contains hardware modelling files, including:
- Solidworks 2019 enclosure models (for layout)
- Altium Designer 2019 PCB and associated schematic files
- Gerber files associated with PCB design
- Bill of materials for PCB components
- piponic: A sensing and control system for aquaponics or hydroponics. Runs on a Raspberry Pi and connects to the mobile application using this repository.
- piponic_cloud: Google Firebase functions that connect Raspberry Pis and the mobile application.
- piponic_app: The mobile application for users to remotely monitor and control their aqua/hydroponic installation. Implemented using Google's Flutter.