Planet Monitoring System Using Sensors

[[email protected]]

Hello all,

My group and I are designing a planet monitoring system that measures moisture, sunlight, temperature, and pH, cataloging this information in a database, and providing an interface that allows users to easily use this info toimprove their gardening techniques.

We have a few questions that we've developed to help us pare down our vision, and I'd be really grateful if any of you could answer some or all of them. Feel free just to address whichever question strikes your fancy. (Hopefully, there is a question that does.) Any other advice is also helpful.

Thanks

Engineering Questions
How will we deal with the effects of temperature on the pH measurement?
What are some ways to provide waterproofing?
What are acceptable margins of error for our sensor measurements?
What government licenses or regulations should be consulted?
What interface would be best in providing the customer with data?
Will we provide simultaneous measurements or provide them one by one through a switching mechanism?

 

[[email protected]]

We're beginning both research and designing right now, but we know more than zilch, lol. However, as undergraduate students, this is our first opportunity to actually design something, and we wanted to get some guidance from people with actual experience.

Feel free to answer our questions with questions, or with answers, or not answer at all. My goal is to use more than just data sheets and our fractured knowledge from disparate courses.

Thank you for the luck, though. I think we'll be okay.

 

[Phil Hobbs]

We're beginning both research and designing right now, but we know more than zilch, lol. However, as undergraduate students, this is our first opportunity to actually design something, and we wanted to get some guidance from people with actual experience.

Feel free to answer our questions with questions, or with answers, or not answer at all. My goal is to use more than just data sheets and our fractured knowledge from disparate courses.

Thank you for the luck, though. I think we'll be okay.

Ah, okay, homework. That makes more sense.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[[email protected]]

This was all pretty helpful. Thanks.

Unfortunately, I copied and pasted the exact same message to a number of places, so there's been a lot of suggestions concerning NASA.

 

[George Herold]

Or senior project work -- that's what it sounds like to me.

Does sound more like a senior project. My only advice is to start small. And do it in parts.
1.) get the data logger working.. maybe just record time of day.
2.) then add one simple measurement (maybe temperature)
3.) then bring up other pieces.


I guess I've just seen failures where the first timer tries to get the whole thing working at once, (which never happens) and then doesn't know how to 'de-bug' it.

George H.