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  • Author Author: Former Member
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Third blog: Cylindrical farming – How the system operates

Former Member

Hi.


In this blog, block diagram of our project is presented and working of the system is explained.


Block diagram showing the entire system is shown below as an attachment.

 

The following conventions have been used in the block diagram:

  1. Orange coloured lines represent electric power flow.
  2. Blue coloured lines represent water and nutrient solution flow.
  3. Black coloured lines represent wires from microcontroller to peripheral hardware.

 

Working:

  1. 1. The middle block (lined in purple) is the growing area where 3 stage growing technique (as mentioned in earlier blog) will be carried out.
  2. 2. Nutrient solution is periodically pumped to the structure. The nutrient concentration of the residual solution (flowing out of the structure) is checked and correspondingly water and nutrients are added. This solution is then re-circulated. Prior to pumping, the solution is treated with UV rays to kill the disease causing microbes.
  3. 3. The Puck board is suitably placed in the enclosure (shown as green cuboid) and its readings of temperature, humidity and ambient lighting are transmitted to the microcontroller board . Based on the sensor readings, the microcontroller actuates (if required) fan, sprayer and/or turns on LEDs.
  4. 4. Energy monitoring circuit is used to sense current drawn from each branch arising from power supply and thus total power consumed is calculated. AEM mode is used to read the power consumed by the boards. 
  5. 5. The microcontroller is connected to local computer via LAN. Information on sensor data, controls, hardware failure and energy consumption is sent over to local computer, which in turn uploads it to internet. Mobile application is developed to control the system from anywhere. Also there is provision to control the entire system from local computer.

 

Hope our explanation of working was clear. Please do post your doubts. We do appreciate suggestions to improve our system.

In our next blog we will post CAD drawings of entire structure comprising of the seed treatment compartment, germination compartment and the cylindrical farm. Details of the structure will also be specified.

Attachments:
image

  • Nice looking design Kowshik.

     

    One question... Do you know of a method for reading the snesor-puck directly from the MCU? I have not found a way to do this. I intend to use an RPi and BLE dongle, at the grow location, to read the sensor-puck, transfering that serialy to the MCU and then transmitting that back to the other MCU. It would be great to be able to remove the RPi from this and go direct to the MCU.

     

    Cheers,

    Rick

  • Hi Kowshik,

     

    Good post. You may want to edit your tags,  'cylindrical_farm' is misspelt, and so I couldn't find your other posts when I clicked on it (it is missing the 'n' currently).

    Also, there is an image tool in the editor palette, that can insert images into the blog page (makes it easier for people to quickly see what your

    blog post is about, without having to explicitly download the image).

    image