Smart Gnome

Description –A self-caring farm/garden system that will use humidity, temperature, and moisture sensors that will indicate various a typical garden need to sustain healthy vegetation and maintain water levels on its own.

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The National Gardening Association states that with around a $70 investment, the Average American can harvest around $600 worth of food in a home-grown garden a year.[5] With that being said, home gardening with the intent to grow vegetables to eat can be a very beneficial way to self-sustain and save on groceries, but even at bare minimum is a great hobby to keep a small personal garden for oneself. Still, the bustle of day-to-day life can leave many to reprioritize activities due to scheduling or just outright not able to tend to everything at once. Gardening, while greatly encouraged, can be a hobby that falls on the wayside as a priority, and unfortunately can suffer the most as gardens need watering and care. With the Smart-Garden, the garden tending becomes a simple refilling of resources and the rest is left to the system, leaving you with a self-caring garden to enjoy!

 

Background

The idea came up when considering the always changing weather in Florida, which can sometimes be unpredictable and be inconsistent with when someone would need to water the garden. On top of this, it is easy to get distracted with everyday life and assume the plants would be ok to not be watered for a day or so, even if it’s been a few dry days. Continuing this can lead to poorly maintained plants and a bad looking garden. The solution to this problem would be to make it less of a task to feed and water your plants and simply have a system to run the watering and feeding for you. The only intended user  interaction would be to refill all consumable materials when the system is low, which would be indicated by the system itself and alert the user of the product.

   

Key features of the Smart Garden / Smart Gnome:

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• Date tracking to count days or weeks in between watering and feeding.

• Moisture detection from the soil to determine whether the plants need watering or not.

• Several factors will be taken into consideration when calculating the intervals of water timing, such as not only lack of moisture, but also if an excessive amount of moisture is detected (caused by rain) the watering will be prolonged to prevent wasting water and overwatering.

• Possible temperature sensing to compare to moisture in soil and have a more accurate watering schedule.

• Solar panels to help power the whole system and maintain as much self-sustaining as possible.

• A backup battery will be included if there is not enough energy collected from solar panels.

• An adjustable schedule that will tell the system to feed the plants and will contain a tank that holds the plant food.

• Indicators of water and plant food tanks that will alert the user of low levels of each present and suggested refilling.

• Potential feature of the smart garden could have a more wireless approach to the garden; if a user’s plants are more spread around the garden or around a business/ office, the modules could speak wirelessly to the “base” of the system, where the microcontroller will take in information and command when each module in each plant should disperse water/food to the plants in the garden.

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Previous approaches to the problem

My Automated Plant Watering System - YouTube

Video description: “Don't you just hate the hassle of finding someone to babysit your plants every time you go on vacation? no..? Well I do, but now I have finally solved this problem of mine for good!”[7]

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In this video Youtuber Emilostuff explains how his DIY plant watering system that uses 4 capacitive moisture sensors, a water pump system with a relay and an app that can control the system in various modes to control the frequency of water being dispersed to the plants they own in order to have it done with no supervision. The similarities are pretty obvious here, and there are many projects like this that offer various solutions to automated gardening on Youtube, this appears to be the most relevant example at this time.

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Gardyn[8]

 

Pros: Fully automated gardening system that makes it easy to use for indoor hydroponic and garden growing for plants that could be used to eat.

The Gardyn system has an assistant app that helps communicate with the user when the garden needs water refilling, plants are ready to be pulled for use, and status of the plants coloring can all be viewed from the accompanying app. It is in a space-saving station that is intended for indoor-home use and makes it easy and accessible for anyone to start up and sustain a garden for salads and ingredients.

 

Cons: The main con is the cost of the product itself and the maintenance of refilling the station itself with seeds to grow. On their website magardyn.com, the starter kit starts at $899 and to maintain an extra two-year membership for refilling the pods for plants can cost an extra $685 for two years of plants. As stated previously, having a home garden can yield up to an average of $600 of produce per year, so assuming these numbers remain constant for the yielding produce Gardyn will give, a person will be saving a less than half that in produce a year. This is also not accounting for the expensive initial investment.

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Block  Diagram