This is my Third Engineering Competition

This is my third and final participation in the Ryerson Engineering Competition as it is my final year of undergrad. Continuing on with the tradition, Deanna and I competed in the Senior Design Competition.

REC 2018

The Objective

The objective of the design is to create a self-sustainable device that can help plants grow with little to no human interaction and status screen to let users know of the plant status.

The Design

The design included several sensors that will allow input reading and the device will then react accordingly from another device component.

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Prototype

• Main Component: Sensors are used to read soil humidity, photoresistor to read the amount of light, and thermister to read the temperature.

• Cover Component: A servo motor with an opaque shield is used to react on the threshold set from the photoresistor.

• LCD Component: The screen will display the current temperature experienced by the plant from the thermistor and also if the plant needs watering from the input from the soil humidity sensor.

The Result

Unfortunately, due to the lack of specifications given on some of the parts, in this case, is the LCD screen, we were unable to display the results on the screen. To bypass this, during the presentation in front of the judges, we asked if we could code it differently to send the results in the serial port instead. The overall project worked according to design but was unfortunately, not enough to beat the other designs. Nevertheless, it was still a great experience and I still had fun.

Project Prototype