My name is Johnny Sun. I'm a systems engineer at DMC and I worked on our automatic solar powered rooftop garden watering system with Ashley Enderlin and Ryan Taylor. Previously we had a temperature and humidity sensor implemented in our little garden to tell us when we needed to water it, but no one really paid attention to it, so all of our plants have died.
Now we're going to revamp it with an automatic watering system that builds on what we've had before. Now we're also measuring the water content of the soil and controlling a garden irrigation system to water the planter whenever we detect that the soil is too dry. We have some herbs like basil and cilantro. I know we have a tomato plant. We used an Arduino, and we have it talking to our temperature and humidity sensor we have it talking to our special soil moisture sensor to determine what the environmental condition of our garden is.
We have a solenoid water valve that we've connected to a garden hose which then we made one of those pop up irrigation sprinkler systems out of some PVC pipes. Once we detect that the soil's too dry it'll turn on the solenoid valve which will allow water to go into our little irrigation system and water the planter.
The entire system is self contained. It has a lead acid battery that's charged by a little solar panel that we have. I'm hoping to have it broadcast the temperature and soil moisture data over our mesh network that we've set up that another team mate has set up so we'll be able to monitor the garden conditions from the office.