Hello vertical farmers!
This is our first post, so we would like to thank element14 and sponsors for starting this great challenge to inspire new ways of doing agriculture.
I heard somewhere that plants swim faster in water than fish! Faster than on land! And I assure you, much cleaner! So our goal is to develop a simple modular automated system to support indoor plant growing of fruits and vegetables based on hydroponics.
What we will need? Control the relevant variables of healthy growth in hydroponics (temperature, humidity, pH, light, nutrients, etc.). We will add to this a monitoring system based on a webcam, a web application for supervision and LED lighting to guarantee full time production. Concerning sustainability, we will implement a renewable energy system.
From this basic idea, the following scheme born on a piece of paper. It summarizes the components of the system.
The key features of the proposed system are:
- Modular (horizontal and vertically)
- Self-sufficient in terms of energy (“net-zero”)
- All year production supported on artificial LED lighting
- Renewable power sources
- Highly efficient
- Hydroponic
- Automated
- Artificial intelligence
- Vision system for monitoring
- True IoT solution
- Low power consumption
Due to the time frame limitation, some components of the proposed system were identified as secondary in the scope of this challenge and will be implemented only after successful implementation of the remaining system. Those items are respectively the aerogenerator and the solar tracking implementation.
We designed the system as shown in the following photo. Ok, it's not a photo yet but we hope it will be soon ;-)
On the next post we'll guide you through our hydroponic system design and implementation.
Follow us on this journey to find new ways to feed the world and feel free to comment or ask any question.
See you in the next post :-)
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