Soil Log

Week 1 (9/3 - 9/9)

We began talking about the project and our objectives. We met with Natalie in class on Friday and it was brought to our attention that the project may be too easy and not take that long to complete. With this in mind, we began brainstorming different ideas to maker project harder while not over-shooting the bar. Some ideas we have thought about are an app that can connect to the mechanical system, using bluetooth with the arduino to connect the mechanical component to a phone, or adding a more sophisticated mechanical component (specifics not yet thought of).

Week 2 (9/10 - 9/16)

Our goal this week was to finalize how we would proceed with our project. After meeting with Natalie we narrowed our options down to the app with a raspberry pi connecting to the mechanical component, or an app with the arduino that connects to the mechanical component (this can be messy and difficult though). We took these thoughts into our meeting with Professor Feher where we learned more about how the raspberry pi operates and what we can do with it. AN interesting thing we learned is that we can create a web application using the pi. After learning this, we came to the conclusion that we will be using a raspberry pi to create a web server and use the Arduino as an ADC in order to allow the raspberry pi to connect to our mechanical component. Using Python and coding the Pi will be a new to the both of us so it will take up quite a bit of time. We will now be working to figure out a design for our project so we can get started with the mechanical parts.

Week 3 (9/17-9/23)

Update 9/21 : Before Wednesday, we both met up and drew out some basic designs that we could implement. On Wednesday we met with Natalie to talk about our procedure going forward and what we need to do this week. We also showed her our designs and talked about them briefly. We decided we would most likely be using some kind of shower head to water the plants (water source will be hanging above the plants). This shower head may use bluetooth and connect to the pi, but we have yet to finalize that. We also made our decision about the arduino. We decided that we will be cutting out the Arduino and solely be using a raspberry pi with an ADC for our system. After talking with Natalie this seemed to be our best course of action in making our project both not too complicated and not too easy. A picture of the design and our budget will be finalized the weekend.

Week 4 (9/24 - 9/30)

This week we decided on a design that we are going to go forward with to start our project. We both spent about 2 and a half hours on Thursday making our project page accurate and correcting some misstatements that we made early about our project. During this time we also decided on the design and made a budget that we hope to get approved so we can move forward and start working on the coding and overall build of the project. Matt made a PowerPoint to show to the class about our project and it took him about 30 minutes to an hour the get the presentation together. We pitched our project idea to the class on Friday. Sean spent about 2 hours over the weekend learning how to code using python and learning how to hook up a raspberry pi to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and get it connected to the internet. We both met in the lab on Tuesday afternoon and got the raspberry pi connected then we messed around on the raspberry pi putting in simple code and seeing how coding on the raspberry pi was different from what we expected.