The Plant Blog 1: Starting The Plant and First Steps

RE: The Plant Blog 1: Starting The Plant and First Steps

e14 Contributor — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 10:43:04 GMT

Impressive first post, I'll read your newer posts with much interest. Aquaponics is indeed a major step forward in making our food-production systems much more efficient, but like you said, creating and maintaining eco-systems is not easy.

How much people does your team consist of? And how professional are you?

RE: The Plant Blog 1: Starting The Plant and First Steps

DAB — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 18:02:46 GMT

Great post.

Yes, it is much harder to grow things using aqua culture than you think of at first glance.

Raising crops is hard work. I grew up in farm country and even with good soil and well timed rain, there are still many variables that can affect your harvest.

I have seen some very successful implementations, but there will always be issues of cost effectiveness.

One bright point is that if it can be done at reasonable cost, there are lots of areas where normal farming can't be done, that could be adapted for this method.

DAB

RE: The Plant Blog 1: Starting The Plant and First Steps

RWReynolds — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 05:14:28 GMT

Nice write-up Erik.

I'm really intrigued with aquaponics, but I think it's a bit of a stretch for me to attempt in this challenge. I've been interested ever since I saw the video below. This blows my mind. And I wonder why it hasn't been duplicated on a massive scale. Meaning lots of small operations similar to what this guy has built.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng.

I'm afraid my grow system will be quite simplistic. As my forte is definitely the automation side of things.

Concerning the EZ32 MCUs. Keep in mind that unless you implement an operating system on them then it will be a bare-metal build. An OS, in this case, would mean implementing an RTOS I believe. Again something I'm not familiar enough with to attempt on this project. I know the EZ32 provides 256K of program Flash memory and 32K of operating RAM. I'm not sure how much of that would be taken by an RTOS. My intention is to implement a bare-metal solution using SimplicityStudio and C/C++. I guess really in C, as I haven't found any C++ examples in the IDE and I will definitely be starting with example code. I have nothing to run them on yet, but I've built a couple of the example projects. The IDE is actually pretty nice. Based on some version of Eclipse.

If you're making major headway with the Pi then it might make sense to move forward with that work and use one of the VCOM interfaces to establish comm between the EZ32 and the Pi. Especially if you have more than one person available to do software development. The Pi definitely makes sense for the logging and IoT aspects of your desihn. I'm considering using a Pi in my build as well. And I know there is another challenger who plans to use a BeagleBone Black. Just remember that you must utilize the EZ32 in some fashion.

Just my thoughts.

RE: The Plant Blog 1: Starting The Plant and First Steps

shanesissons — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 02:44:14 GMT

Hey,

great idea i had never thought of using aquaponics or even heard of the idea but if it can be controlled correctly you could be onto a great idea here

kinda reminds me of a viral clip a few years ago where goldfish lived at the bottom of a deep fat fryer and ate all of the batter that fell down

good look and i hope that the ph sensor eliminates the issues you had previously

shane