Process

The first step in my process was to understand hydroponics. I then spoke to an expert from India who was able to shed light on the challenges he faces as a hydroponics farmer. While there are various challenges in hydroponics that can be solved using an IoT device, for the scope of this project and keeping in mind the resources available to me, I narrowed it down to water level detection.

In order to set up my device, I had to select a sensor that would be able to easy to work with at the same time accurate and easily available. I selected the soil moisture sensor YL-69 since it is accurate, available at tech spark and was simple to set up.

While I have worked with the piezo and LED light in the lab sessions, I had not worked with soil moisture sensors before. I had to study it in terms of how to set it up and also the type of readings it would provide before I could use it.

While writing my code, I decided to incorporate one element (i.e. sensor, piezo & LED) at a time. So I would write the code, run it to see if it works and then proceed to add more elements. This ensured I was adding on more elements only once the previous elements were working.