Envidrawer 11 - Summary

6 Jan 2021

Previous blogs	Description
#1 - Introduction, the plan and materials preparation	In this blog post we describe the project's main concept and some initial high-level design of it.
#2 - Materials and casing assembly	Our journey with selecting proper materials, cutting and assembling the drawer and its casing!
#3 - Modelling, cutting, planting!	The title says it all: this part describes some modelling we did before cutting some holes in the drawer and finally planted some vegetables!
#4 - Plants, harvests, and fertilisers	First harvest, problems with plants and used fertilisers. All that went off-script for our plants in the artificial environment.
#5 - Piping and pumping - water and liquid fertiliser delivery system	Design and development of water supply system.
#6 - Mix of fixes - various fixes to water supply, lighting and hardware	Polish and fixes of various components of the system, all the small things.
#7 - Ride the lightning - Wiring diagram, pinout and components discussion	Diagram of the circuit, pinout for most components, wire choices and their connections
#8 - Pulling the strings	LED and Fan control circuit, overview of BJTs and MOSFETs with a handful of useful general information
#9 - 3D printing and modelling	Detailed description of 3D printed components, their presentation and some tips
#10 - Software, architecture and the benefits of good preparation	Big explanation of the software and its architecture

Introduction

Hi and thanks for staying with us through this whole adventure!

It was a long ride (and not without it bumps), but finally we managed to achieve our goals and now we have our own smart gardening system under the bed!

In this (last) post we will present our pitch video about Envidrawer and we recommend watching it even if you think you know everything about our project.

Motors and capacitance sensors previously unseen in this project have been finally revealed in this video (they took quite a long time to prepare!)

Pitch video

Future directions

As the project is delivered our heads are still bursting with ideas on how to make it better and more functional.

For now we plan to focus on sensor fusion in order to have some home-made algorithms which will deal with various sensors we have installed inside the Envidrawer as well as some external information which may impact the Envidrawer indirectly (outside temperature, humidity etc.).

Moreover, we aim to work on the Web Application (Envimonitor) in order to remote control, camera feed and maybe some image recognition to detect pests or any other issues in the system.

Having a self-regulating system is our long-term aim, so that the Envidrawer may become as human-independent as possible.

We may also substitute Arduino we are using for sensor readouts with an external multi-channel ADC to reduce external components in the project.

Adding additional movement modes for the drawer seems also like a liable possibility as it seems like the motors are really powerful and we could maybe make this drawer even more portable (so that for example people with back pain or seniors would not be overburdened).

Having some kind of pest control would be also welcome (be it with image recognition help or with some other means).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all members of element14, who provided us with valuable insights and critique so that we could improve our project even further. For a first project in this community (and probably first such big multidisciplinary project ever!) we feel a great sense of accomplishment and are eager for further challenges.

We also would like to thank our family for providing us with support and field-testing the product during development. After all, family provides the best criticism (of course constructive!).

Working alongside a pet is also a risky business, thus we would like to thank our pupil Bruno for not wrecking havoc and providing feedback on the project (in the form of accommodating different elements of our drawer, like was seen in the sixth blog entry).

Jakub & Michał & Szymon (3 Brothers )