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

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Submit a Project Entry!

Monthly Design Competitions, Earn Rewards, Decide Themes, Your Ideas, Your Projects, Turn Ideas into Projects.

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About Project14
Project Theme
Project Theme Poll

 

Discuss Your Project Ideas in the Comments Below!

 

Three First Place Winners Will Receive $100 worth of any BOM from any element14 transactional site!

 

The Going Green theme for this Electronics & Design Competition is to create awesome technology for the backyard or garden.  You are free to create any awsome tech for the garden or backyard. This could be anything that is specific to the garden, the BBQ, an outdoor pond, automate outdoor chores, or something using an LCD display so you can enjoy a movie or a sporting event outdoor.   Those are just some ideas to help get you thinking about a tech device you'd like to see outdoors. 

 

In the past people have come up with their own devices to help them grow fruits and vegetables, cook food the way the want to, create cooling devices to deal with the summer heat, and automate outdoor yard work.  Technology devices can be made to bring the things you enjoy doing inside such as playing video games, watching movies, listening to music, or sharing photos on a big screen.   Gatherings outdoors bring to mind food on the grill, a projector set up to enjoy movies, listening to tunes while you chat with friends, a cooling device for cold beverages or storing food to be put on the grill, and controlling the temperature so everyone is comfortable.  

 

is design a device for the Garden It's summer time and the community has spoken, Going Green, awesome technology for the garden or backyard is the monthly theme for the first project competition picked by the community members. Take a moment to step outside, take in some fresh air, fire up the grill, and do something involving gardening.  While you’re at it, why not make something useful that will allow you to do all those things, and create a cool video afterwards to show us your favorite way of going green.

 

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Many people use the outdoors to get away from technology, this project competition challenges you to use awesome technology for the garden or backyard. What types of things do you like to do outdoors and how can tech be used to make your outdoor experiences more memorable?  How can you do the things you love to do in the summer while using technology to make your life easier? If you love gardening, there's a lot of documentation out their on garden automation projects using a microcontroller such as an Arduino.  It has several analog and digital inputs/outputs for you to hook up sensors, buttons, and switches.

 

Perhaps, you want to use something other than an Arduino.  That’s alright. Use whatever electronics components you want!  Or, if grilling is more your thing then perhaps an automated bbq that allows you to cook your food at exactly the right temperature, for the perfect level of doneness without losing any flavor!

 

 

 

 

You can do whatever project you want as long as you stick to the theme. 

Go green and show us what kind of awesome technology you would make for your backyard and garden!

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Here are some examples of ideas to help get you started:

  • Infra-red underwater motion-activated pond camera.
  • Shed security.
  • Automated BBQ
  • A green friendly way to repel bugs
  • A solar powered device
  • Indoor Gardening
  • Outdoor Gardening
  • Any Project around Energy Efficiency

 

If you're in a place where you need to do your gardening indoors there are a lot ideas for that as well:

 

 

 

 

Ben builds a light compensator to supply indoor plants light when the sun isn’t able to provide enough light for them.  He uses a Texas Instrument MSP430 Launchpad Development Board, a TI BOOST-AD7042, a DS1307 real time clock, and a grow light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directions:

Step 1: Log in or register on element14, it's easy and free.

Step 2: Post in the comments section below to begin a discussion on your idea. Videos, pictures and text are all welcomed forms of submission.

Step 3: Submit a blog post of your progress on your project by the end of the month.  You are free to submit as many blog entries as you like until the beginning of the next theme. We'll accept blog posts until 12:00 am CDT August 14th, 2017.

 

Be sure to include video proof that your project is your own!

 

In the Comments below Submit Your Ideas for Awesome Technology for the Backyard!

Attachments:
imageTerms_and_Conditions_Going_Green.pdf

  • Like many others, I have had a project that I have wanted to do for a while that needs to get done and why not now?  That is use the water I already collect and maybe collect more to water the garden. Currently I dump one collection tank into my pond and the other in the yard.

     

    • Goals
      • Monitor water levels in tanks and pump water in collection tanks around the house (currently I pump over 100 gallons a day out of my basement sump pump systems)
      • Buy no new hardware with the exception of the following
        • Pump
        • Pipe
        • Large water tank
        • Solenoid valve to control water flow to garden
        • (optional) soil moisture sensor
      • System needs to be automated, because now I do not like to have to get up after I am in bed to turn off watering the garden or have it water all night
      • Being able to monitor the inside for sump pump failure
      • Easy to setup in the Spring and take down in the Fall
      • Logging and alerts
    • Likes
      • Use a combination of Raspberry/Banana Pi or Intel Edison and ESP8266 modules (remote sensors)
      • Use green energy like solar or wind, we have one or the other in Indiana (USA) each day - Longer term maybe

  • I've thought of three 'Going Green' projects I'd quite like to do, but can't decide between them.

     

    1) Inpired by Doug's environmental monitoring Design Challenge, I'd be interested in making a portable NO2 monitor. I thought perhaps I could do a small, lightweight one that was solar powered and sat on a hat. I wouldn't be able to use the catalytic kind of sensor [a shame, really, as I could then call it the 'Cat in the Hat'] because of the power requrements, but electrochemical sensors are available that inherently run on very small currents, so it sounds do-able. If there was enough power (the solar cell I took out of a garden light in a blog post a little while back was surprisingly good, so I guess that there might be) it would be useful to also run a GPS module - then I could simply 'walk and scan' and plot the results on a map when I got home.

     

    2) Like many people, I have a water butt in my garden to collect rainwater for watering plants. I thought it might be interesting to make a water level sensor, so that I could tell how much water remained. Again, I'd like it to be solar powered, so it would need to be relatively low power. What I fancy trying would be a capacitative sensor, largely because it would entail fiddling around with electronic circuits and electrical properties and that interests me much more than writing code. I haven't figured out what I would do with the sensor data after that. Low power radio might be one approach - it's not like it has to update very often. Possibly there are other ways - one speculative idea I had was a 'firefly' network, with different items in the garden swapping data after dark by flashing leds at each other [which is probably a whole project in itself].

     

    3) The final idea was a miniature solar-powered weather station, with a thermometer, humidity sensor, rainfall guage, barometer, and all the other things you'd measure. This would be really neat and useful, but I think it might be too much for a Project14 effort. Perhaps I ought to do one of those measurements as a standalone item, with some kind of networking so that I could add others gradually (I could probably sneak a few of them in as future Project14 entries).

     

    Any thoughts or further ideas from all you clever mentor people would be welcome. Which one is sensible for me to try, given the time available and my interest in electronics rather than coding? Are there better solutions than the ones I've thought about?

  • Hi, I´m planning to create a nursery box as a little greenhouse to plant different kinds of aromatic plants. But I would like to control different variables as lighting, flux o water between others...

  • I need to create an innovation project related to green technology ,,,, so I need help to think of an idea to do what project later ,,,,,, please help me,,,,,,

  • I'm planning on using a Raspberry Pi Zero W equipped with a Pimoroni Automation pHat to control a 12v solenoid valve and automatically water my garden from a rain barrel. Pimoroni gives you reference programs but hey are all very basic and as a noob at this I'll have to learn some basic Python to get this up and running. I would ultimately like to equip my Raspberry Pi with environmental sensors for data collection and turn this into a full fledged smart garden.