Senior Design Team sddec21-08 • IoT Sensor Project

Hello, and welcome to our project's website.

Our team consists of 5 seniors in the ECPE department at Iowa State: 2 software engineers, 1 computer engineer, and 2 electrical engineers

This semester, we were presented with a relatively open-ended goal: to make a product that makes use of IoT sensors for a practical solution. Given these parameters, we went through several stages of brainstorming, review, and revision.

Eventually, our team settled on a project we are very excited about: using IoT sensors to help design an easy to use plant growth monitoring system.

Our problem statement:

Gardening, farming, or even caring for a houseplant, takes care and time. As life gets busy, people (especially those new to growing plants) are especially prone to forget to water and care for their plants, causing them to die. Even professionals like those who run nurseries need to expend a lot of time and manpower to keep their plants healthy.

IoT sensors can make this easier for both groups. By planting a sensor module along with a plant, users can take the mental work out of gardening, and let algorithms guide their actions. Rather than guess if their plant needs watering again, they can log onto the provided website and examine the plant's water consumption and current supply. If the days are getting longer and sunlight levels are changing, they can view sunlight charts and see if the plant should be moved somewhere else to get more/less sunlight.

The goal of our project is to develop an easy-to-use IoT sensor ecosystem to be used in conjunction with growing and monitoring plant life. The final project will consist of a sensor module that users can attach their sensors to, which will connect to a microcontroller that will send the data to an AWS server. Users will be able to go on this website and view the status and relative position of their sensors, as well as generated graphs of each sensor’s value over time. Recommendations on repositioning (for better light), watering, and re-fertilizing the soil will be generated off this data. For home gardeners who likely don’t tend to their gardens every day, they will be able to receive reminders when the moisture sensor detects less moisture than their plant requires.

Once completed, this project will be a massive boon for farmers and gardeners, both hobbyists and professionals alike.

Please visit our Project Documentation page to see some in-depth documentation on what we've accomplished so far. Our Gitlab repository is also a good reference, as is our Github repository, which was used for deploying our front-end to our AWS Amplify app (AWS could not deploy our enterprise Gitlab repo for us, hence the multiples).

To see our website in action, please visit the Amplify App. Without any sensors hooked up, your homepage will look quite empty, so take a look at our demo video on the Documents page to see the project in action.