My group and I are designing a planet monitoring system that measures moist ure, sunlight, temperature, and pH, cataloging this information in a databa se, and providing an interface that allows users to easily use this info to improve their gardening techniques.
We have a few questions that we've developed to help us pare down our visio n, and I'd be really grateful if any of you could answer some or all of the m. Feel free just to address whichever question strikes your fancy. (Hope fully, there is a question that does.) Any other advice is also helpful.
Thanks
Engineering Questions How will we deal with the effects of temperature on the pH measurement? What are some ways to provide waterproofing? What are acceptable margins of error for our sensor measurements? What government licenses or regulations should be consulted? What interface would be best in providing the customer with data? Will we provide simultaneous measurements or provide them one by one throug h a switching mechanism?
So in other words you know zilch about your own product. Good luck with that.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
We're beginning both research and designing right now, but we know more than zilch, lol. However, as undergraduate students, this is our first opportunity to actually design something, and we wanted to get some guidance from people with actual experience.
Feel free to answer our questions with questions, or with answers, or not answer at all. My goal is to use more than just data sheets and our fractured knowledge from disparate courses.
Thank you for the luck, though. I think we'll be okay.
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
I'm hypothesizing here, but you don't speak English as a native language, you started with your language's word for "dirt", that became "earth" (which is a fair, if overly polite word for "dirt"), that became "Earth", and "Earth", as a proper noun, names a planet.
You mean "soil monitoring system".
(Here's a quick breakdown: "dirt" is soil that no one cares about. "soil" is what you grow plants in. "earth" is "soil" in the garden of a rich man. the "ground" is where you find "dirt", "soil" and/or "earth".
Clothing can get dirty or soiled, but not earthed. Oddly enough, electrical circuits can get grounded, or if they're on British soil, earthed. But a dirty electrical circuit isn't shorted to ground, it's just got unwanted stuff on it.
If this doesn't help, I hope it at least amuses.)
You know more than me. I assume that you have a pH sensor in mind, and that it is temperature sensitive? Why not just measure the temperature and compensate? If the pH itself changes with temperature, I'd suggest just logging them both together.
Many. If you have a sufficient budget you can just buy waterproof cases and connectors. If this only has to work for a term you can leave the bottom of your case open to the air and make sure that all the cables exit downward (so that no drips can find their way into connectors). Your stuff will experience slow corrosion, but your goal here (I assume) is to graduate before anything rusts away.
That's for you to decide. In a commercial environment, that question would be answered by the product line manager, who would (or damned well _should_ know what the market wants). In general terms, narrow enough to be useful. For gardening, I suspect that the answer is "pretty wide".
Perhaps the best thing to do if you can is to see if there are any botany professors (you'll find them in the biology department). Find one in his office, tell him what you're doing, tell him what information you need and ask for a book recommendation. You'll either get that or you'll get a list of the precisions you need.
It's best if you're doing the above that you choose a hypothetical market segment -- i.e. amateur gardeners, farmers, or researchers. Each of these three communities will, in general, have rising needs for precision.
Where are you on this planet? Are you going to sell these or just make one as a demonstration? In the US, as long as you're below some magic voltage (I think it's 42 volts, but I know 12V is safe), you aren't releasing any toxic chemicals, and you aren't making any promises about accuracy, then you don't really come under any laws.
That question is too open. Here again, in a commercial environment that would be the job of the product line manager to decide, possibly in consultation with engineering to get an idea of what costs what.
This is another question for your hypothetical product line manager, in consultation with engineering about costs. ADC chips are cheap these days, so it may be cheapest to _not_ switch things, but just get more ADC channels.
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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
Does sound more like a senior project. My only advice is to start small. And do it in parts.
1.) get the data logger working.. maybe just record time of day.
2.) then add one simple measurement (maybe temperature)
3.) then bring up other pieces.
I guess I've just seen failures where the first timer tries to get the whole thing working at once, (which never happens) and then doesn't know how to 'de-bug' it.
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