We would like to make indoor farming a sustainable and simple solution for the future. This will be achieved through a fully configurable and automated end-to-end hydroponic farm controller. Hydroponics is an already proven solution for more bountiful crop yields and environmentally safe growing conditions. It’s the future of farming, however it’s a highly technical process and can be extremely tedious to manually monitor. We hope to design a solution that can make hydroponic farming as easy as plug and play. By removing the learning, we can make this a technology that will bring about a new era of crop growing. 

Hydroponics is a method to grow plants by exposing roots directly to nutrient solutions. It is a much more efficient agricultural system than traditional farming as it requires 80% less water and at least 20% less space. Growing plants in a hydroponics system is simple to set up but can be difficult to maintain because water pH and nutrient levels require constant manual monitoring. We will automate this process and make hydroponics accessible and integratable into farms and homes.

    We will experiment with growing lettuce and mint. This will make hydroponic farms more accessible for the general public as it will be lower cost and easy to use.

We will prototype with the PSoC® 6 WiFi-BT Pioneer Kit (CY8CKIT-062-WIFI-BT)

We will use AWS cloud services for data logging and remote user connectivity. Users can view solution status and other parameters easily from their computer. They can also view these parameters over time in easy to read graphs. Users can also configure their controllers remotely if anomalies are detected. Also, we can offload most of our computing needs to cloud resources for our more complicated needs such as predicting nutrient injections and balancing resources.

We have experience programming bare-metal with NRF52840 for electric skateboard remote and data logging telemetry. Use of bluetooth to connect to mobile app. We have previously worked on a wifi project using ESP32 to scan wifi networks and send data to remote database. As a result we have extensive experience with embedded systems in both bare-metal and RTOS applications in STM32, AVR, PSoC, NRF52.