Automated mini-greenhouse

Background Story

Hi fellow Arduino enthousiasts and makers of all kind! We are a bunch of 15 year old students from Belgium, who went on a challenging adventure with our teacher. @the_dragon

Our project is all about building an automated mini-greenhouse. The purpose is to have some mini-greenhouses in the classroom so we "the students" can (every year) do all kinds of scientific research with it. Research like measuring temperature, humidity, moisture, light,... then use IoT and datalogging so graphs and charts can be made. We can study the effects of dry, wet, cold, hot, light, dark,.... environments on all kinds of plants.

The making of

To complete this project, we had to design and build a mini-greenhouse from scratch. We had to do some reseach on wood choices, construction principles, use CAD-programs to design our greenhouse...

An even bigger challenge was to create the necessary electronical devices to get everything automated. Since we didn't have ANY experience with Arduino coding it was a bit overwhelming at first. After lots of trying and frying some sensors we started to get the hang of it. Our teacher showed us the way where to find the information and inspiration we needed. (Arduino.cc, the Arduino project hub,...)

The arrival of the Oplà IoT kit helped us so much! It comes with all the sensors we needed and with the online tutorials you are set to go in no time. We love the dashboard in the Arduino IoT cloud!

The unboxing video:

The future

Allthough this project is running, it is far from complete. We are planning to add tons of stuff like lights and light-sensors for studying the effects of lighting on plants. We also want to add some kind of data logging system for all of our gathered data and some camera's would be awesome, so we can film the growth evolution...

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