Build Awesome Technology for the Garden or Backyard by Going Green!

How about if I want to make a rubber tapping knife using a small machine like the diseased motor ......... this project to facilitate the rubber tappers ..... and the price is cheap .....

Do you have a project of remotes vacuum??

Ok. Yes that is true and actually that was being considered. A solar Panel on the shed roof would work quite well.

If you use a solar panel to charge your battery, that would make it a green project.

It was mentioned as one of the ideas, namely "Shed security". It's not quite "going green" (although it could refer to "going green" with rage when your shed has been raided) but it is garden related technology.

This has been on my mind for some time now, especially since my bike was stolen from the garden shed well over a year ago and those pesky thieves raided plenty of other sheds in the neighbourhood.

Been looking at what's available currently as COT's (commercial-off-the-shelf) products. There are two types of sensor technology used. PIR sensors for motion detection and magnetic door (reed switch) sensors. Many but not all of these products are battery powered. Then there's the trigger output. Some of the products on offer are wireless, which sends an alarm transmission to a base station and some have sirens which blast out high dB's to deter the wannabe thieves and annoy the neighbourhood.

So how does one improve this mature technology? My first thought is to change the legacy design from signal led outputs (i.e. wired alarms simply provide NC or NO outputs & wireless simply transmit an alarm code) to a message or data led outputs (i.e. create a context within the message sent wirelessly). Second thought is to try and improve reliability by choosing different Fresnel lens configs for the PIR and then link the control logic to other sensors such as a door sensor. However, reed sensors on wooden shed doors is a non-starter (IMHO) as in my experience they create too many false alarms. Hence the idea is to use a rotary encoder at the door hinge. I tried this on a door using a rotary potentiometer and that worked pretty well. However, I quite like the rotary encoder as it also provides directionality but more importantly, you can link it to an external interrupt pin which helps for battery power operation.

For connectivity. I was thinking Sigfox as this gives plenty great coverage at very low cost. Otherwise, it's a case of using RF such as LoRa with a base station rather than making it wifi or Bluetooth based as you could have coverage issues in a large garden. Any comment on this approach welcomed?

Finally for output. I was thinking it probably would be beneficial to have an alarm output but was thinking to make it trigger for only a couple of seconds at a time. This saves on battery power and reduces neighbourhood annoyance, as I still cannot fathom why on earth the security industry thinks that a residential siren should continue for 10's of minutes at a time.

My project idea is to create a solar powered weather station and Wifi AP Router out of a Raspberry Pi 3 for the yard.

I'd say that the first two were each a whole design challenge - I couldn't see myself doing either in the one month timescale of a Project 14 challenge, though they sound like great things to work on over a longer timescale. Be careful with the slug zapper - you might find it safer if the robot had short spikes on the underside and just sat on the offending pest.

Just a thought, but you might be able to do either of them as an entry in the IoT on Wheels challenge if your robot had wheels.

The third idea sounds like you could piece it together over a couple of weekends and is constrained enough that it's pretty much guaranteed you could get it going successfully, so in your place I think I'd look at doing that one.

Our project consists in elaborate a small hydroponic garden that could be in any house big or small in you will can cultivate fresh food. It will count with pH and conductivity sensors to verify the richness of the substratum also sensors of humidity and temperature of the environment. An  actuator functions as a bomb who recirculates the water, the air and a aerator to slow down the temperature.

The description of this all system will be connected in a esp8266 o eps32 module directly communicate with a mobile app to interact with the plants and verify their increase and the precise moment to be consume. Next time expect our concept in pictures      

Now I'm thinking...."What doesn't make a garden 'green' ?" I know in mine I'm annoyed at all the bits of plastic etc that wash out of the soil that shouldn't be there. They come from items that previous owners have dug into the ground, wind blown rubbish or now even found in shop bought compost.

Project Idea 1: A robot to collect these automatically. Using a colour camera and simple servo controlled scoops. Larger pieces could be mapped via GPS for the homeowner to remove manually.

Another thing that isn't particularly eco-friendly is the chemicals used to get rid of slugs and snails. Birds will often eat the dying slugs and so ingest the poisons - making them ill as well.

Project Idea 2: A RPi image recognition (for a slow moving slug/snail) and a IR laser to kill the slug. Auto off in daylight for added safety. A narrow field of view to again constrain the possibility of eye damage. Or couple it to a simple auto roaming robot - laser looks down and zaps slugs that it passes over.

Bird baths are a great way to help wildlife but not only need topping up but also cleaning out (because birds seem to like to poop in their own drinking water).

Project Idea 3: To periodically (via timer) use a servo to dump the water out of the plastic bird bath and then once back to its original position fill it via a 12v water solenoid/pump from mains or the water butt. Such a system could also be put somewhere a bit more out of the way e.g. safer for birds from cats.

Fellow Element14 members...feel free to enter your own take on any of these ideas !

Just realised - 1) doesn't fit the theme. I was focused on the 'Going Green' and forgot it had to be within the confines of a garden. Me going walkabout doesn't cut the mustard.

I've also just remembered the other one I wanted to try:

4) Leaf colour spectrometer. This is inspired by the roadtest a little while back of the spectrometer from TI. I wondered about trying something VERY cheap and cheerful, like a torch bulb, a grating based on a DVD with a mechanical arrangement to do the spectrum scan (pity I don't have a 3-D printer), and a PIN diode to sense the light level, with the spectrum being displayed directly an LCD connected to an Arduino or a Launchpad. I could calibrate the wavelength scale with LEDs. The level calibration could come straight from the PIN diode datasheet - they usually give you a good curve to work with. I reckon that could be made small enough to be a portable device that could be held against a leaf on a plant or tree.