IoT Hydroponics Project Group 5 Dominic Pucci Garrick Servello Matthew McCoy

Problem Statement Hydroponics is not user friendly Most hydroponic systems are expensive Wanted to create a system that would allow anyone to practice hydroponics Wanted to make this system reliable and cheaper than the alternatives

Goals and Objectives Create a fully automated hydroponics system System must be relatively cheap System must be reliable System must be efficient

General Architecture

The Technology

Deep Water Culture System Essentially just a container with water Holds the plant pots No pumping of water

Electrical Conductivity meter Sensors Electrical Conductivity meter pH meter

EZOTM Circuits by Atlas Scientific

Raspberry Pi Shield

Partial Circuit Setup

Pumps

Software Using Java as the main development language because Thingworx supports Java very well. Pi4J is used to interface with the Raspberry Pi. Pi4J allows us to easily use the UART port on the Raspberry pi to send and receive data for both the Ph meter and Electrical Conductivity Meter. Pi4J allows us to easily setup GPIO pins for turning our motors on and off We use the Thingworx Micro Edge Server to send data from our pi to the Thingworx platform The Micro Edge Server basically just setups a Websocket to the Thingworx platform to send data back and forth. We poll the Ph and EC meter at regular intervals to send data to the Thingworx platform. The sensors had to be calibrated before they could correctly read values. To do these we used a Python script and the pySerial library to send commands to the sensor for easy calibration.

UI -- Thingworx Receives data from an edge server running on the pi Can push data at any interval we want Displays real-time values of pH and TDS Stores and displays a history of pH and TDS values in line graphs

UI -- Thingworx

Accomplishments Have successfully set up a DWC hydroponic system Have successfully interfaced pH and TDS sensors with the Pi Have successfully pushed pH and TDS values to ThingWorx in real time

Remaining Work Finish setting up the pumps Set up decision making for when to turn the pumps on and off Mount all loose circuits

Business Potential Very marketable As mentioned previously, hydroponics is hard! People would rather buy a premade system than spend a lot of time and money learning hydroponics manually

Suggestions for Future Development ThingWorx is still very limited Try using a different web interface, or build one from scratch Implement some form of notification -- email or otherwise Develop a mounting case for all of the circuitry

Questions?