Challenges:

We faced two major challenges during this project and they are explained below:

1. Programming the if statement for the motor: Once we were able to get the soil moisture sensor (SMS) read and sending readings to the cloud, we had some difficulty figuring out how to get the motor to turn off and on when the moisture reading was below 200. This is partially because we were relying too heavily on documentation done by other people and because their projects were actually much different than ours. There isn't much documentation about how to program motors when information is read by a more complicated sensor like the SMS that we chose. Ultimately, we found a particle.io community project that was somewhat similar to ours and made sense to us (referenced below) and we manipulated the code to suit our needs.

2. Setting up the motor hardware: Online, we also found many different ways to set up the DC motor we used. We were able to power it and connect it to the cloud easily, but we had difficulty wiring it correctly so that it was not on all the time and could turn on and off per the commands sent to it by the SMS. Ultimately, our professor, Daragh Byrne, and TA, Roberto Andaya, guided us to resolve this issue by directing us to the transistor we should use TIP120 and a better way of wiring the motor, which is how it is wired in the fritzing diagram shown earlier in our documentation.