Our team selected this project for our Senior Design as we believe such a product will have great marketability in the near future. At this point in time, the world’s pollution problem has led to unpredictable weather conditions all over the world. With these ever changing weather conditions, it is expected that the number of greenhouses will significantly increase in the near future, thus leading to a great demand for automated greenhouse monitoring systems.
Objectives:
The main goal is to build a miniature greenhouse which is equipped with an automatic monitoring system. This monitoring system will constantly monitor the conditions in the greenhouse to ensure that it remains at preset temperature, light and humidity conditions. If these conditions differ from the preset levels, the monitoring system will automatically turn on certain devices to return the greenhouse to the required conditions.
Benefits:
Automatically control the growing environment within the walls so that any type of plants can be grown all year round.
Eliminates the risk of the greenhouse not being kept at specified conditions due to human error.
Minimizes the labor costs involved in maintaining a greenhouse.
Customer will be able to define their preferred greenhouse conditions and have the system function as specified.
This will be a “plug-and play” product.
Features:
Detect temperatures from -40°C to 125°C.
Maintain a temperature of about 10°C to about 40°C.
Detect humidity between 5% RH and 95% RH.
Maintain a humidity of about 40% to 80% RH.
Detect sunlight and artificial light.
Turn on artificial lighting in the event that there is insufficient light.
Design:
Block Diagram:
Block Descriptions:
Overall Design:
For our Automated Greenhouse Monitoring System, we will implement 3 types of sensors. The sensors to be used are photodiodes, a temperature sensor and a humidity sensor. We