Gardening Help - Plant Monitoring Using Sensors

[qmellis]

Hello all,


I'm an EE student working on my senior project, but my group and I are still in the design stage. We're designing a planet monitoring system that measures moisture, sunlight, temperature, and pH, cataloging this information in a database, and providing an interface that allows users to easily use this info to improve their gardening techniques.


We have a few questions that we've developed to help us pare down our vision, and I'd be really grateful if any of you could answer some or all of them. Feel free just to address whichever question strikes your fancy. (Hopefully, there is a question that does.)


Thank you all very much.


Questions

Under what weather conditions do you usually garden? Which seasons? Where?

What do you primarily grow?

What issues do you most often have when gardening?

How large is your garden?

What would make gardening easier for you?

How much would you be willing to pay for a device that would help you garden?

How long would you expect a device like this to last?

What feature would you use the most? The least?

 

[pdxchristine]

Questions

Under what weather conditions do you usually garden? Which seasons? Where? Anything but snow!

What do you primarily grow? veggies and herbs: tomatoes, carrots, beans, spinach, thyme, rosemary, basil.

What issues do you most often have when gardening? pests and watering consistently

How large is your garden? The space for it is about 12x30ft but it is not currently fully utilized.

What would make gardening easier for you? a magical device that could sense soil moisture and water the area accordingly - zones might be necessary for that. Also monitoring soil temperatures to know when planting/transplanting can begin.

How much would you be willing to pay for a device that would help you garden? I'm not sure. $100 or less? Depends on what it does. Does it just give out information or does it automate watering tasks as well?

How long would you expect a device like this to last? 5 years, I'd hope.

What feature would you use the most? The least? Probably the sunlight feature. I already have a pretty good idea of what to expect with sunlight in my area.

 

[qmellis]

Cool, this is really helpful.

The idea is to provide info and to automate the tasks, but our advisor is already warning us that we might have a problem designing a device that does both. We're thinking the watering would be a piece of cake, but the pH adjustment would be almost impossible for a group of undergraduates to tackle. We'll see what happens during the design process.

For pests we were thinking of including a sensor to sense (ha!) them and output a high frequency noise to deter them, but what do you usually do to tackle that problem?

Questions

Under what weather conditions do you usually garden? Which seasons? Where? Anything but snow!

What do you primarily grow? veggies and herbs: tomatoes, carrots, beans, spinach, thyme, rosemary, basil.

What issues do you most often have when gardening? pests and watering consistently

How large is your garden? The space for it is about 12x30ft but it is not currently fully utilized.

What would make gardening easier for you? a magical device that could sense soil moisture and water the area accordingly - zones might be necessary for that. Also monitoring soil temperatures to know when planting/transplanting can begin.

How much would you be willing to pay for a device that would help you garden? I'm not sure. $100 or less? Depends on what it does. Does it just give out information or does it automate watering tasks as well?

How long would you expect a device like this to last? 5 years, I'd hope.

What feature would you use the most? The least? Probably the sunlight feature. I already have a pretty good idea of what to expect with sunlight in my area.