Terraflow
A Smart Plant-Care Device
Taking care of plants can be hard.
Taking care of them consistently can often be impossible whilst also living a hectic life. As college students this was something that we were all too familiar with. That is why we set out to create the Terraflow!
Our goal with the Terraflow was to help all sorts of people who didn’t have the time, energy, or know-how to take care of a plant. Whether that be newbies who are just getting started, those who have limited physical ability, or even experienced plant owners that just don’t have the time.
To get the ball rolling, we decided on what we needed to measure and what the Terraflow needed do to keep the plant healthy.
-
Making sure the plant is able to photosynthesize.
-
Our main metric for determing when the plant needs to be watered.
-
Vital for the care of many delicate plants.
-
Plants need water. The best thing we can do to actively help people take care of their plants.
My specific role on the team was integrating the electrical components with the physical design and computer GUI and so I got work making a basic schematic and getting data from the sensors.
Although this did work, I see a relay being a better option for the future as it would allow us to run a higher-powered pump off the 3v3 signal the ESP32 can output.
I opted for the use of a transistor to control the pump as it gave complete control to the microcontroller for when the plant needed to be watered.
The real difficulty came when I had to integrate the data being read from the measurement probe to the computer GUI. This taught me a great deal about SERIAL communication!
I created a code phrase system. The computer would wait for the Arduino to send it a code phrase for each line of before reading the binary choices calculated on the Arduino (“TOO HOT” “NOT ENOUGH LIGHT”).
Serial communication across a USB port will often send sections of data at a time, not consistently sending the whole line of data each time.
This admittedly strange way of communicating data enables the Terraflow to communicate with the computer GUI!
In many ways, this project was a leap of faith. I took on problems that I had no idea how to solve—but I solved them—and along the way I learned the value of a hero shift.
I pulled a lot of hero shifts. Staying up all night long just so a certain system works and as important as it is to not slow down others, it’s also important that the job is done right.
After talking to a few computer engineers about my project, they informed me that the way I had implemented Serial communication was very similar to the actual way that computer engineers do it! Simply missing the end of the message signal so that more complicated information could be sent.
I had put a great amount of time and effort in, but all I had done was reinvent the wheel. Had I taken some time and asked for help previously—working smarter—I could have redirected my time into the places that needed it more. Still being reliable and still getting the job done.