No Gardening Allowed

Inspiration

We wanted to do a project that forced us how to weld, involved embedded programming, and presented difficult integration challenges

What it does

It moves around on a rack & pinion and robotically waters plants. A long planter contains the soil and plants. A hacked Keurig coffee machine and a recycle milk jug donated to us by a recycle bin to create a reservoir and pump system to move water from a container to the individual plants.

How we built it

We custom-welded the long planter out of steel. We use the Rust programming language on a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) microcontroller to drive a stepper motor and control the pump (the pump is actually controlled through a relay switched with an optocoupler). We ported parts of the Arduino Stepper library to Rust. Rust is an emerging technology in the field of embedded devices.

Challenges we ran into

Challenge: We didn't know how to weld Triumph: We still don't know how to weld, but we did get plenty of welds that stuck ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Challenge: 3d printing a pump is hard Triumph: Organ-harvested a Keurig

Challenge: Sheet metal was too thin for our welding process and skill, causing us to blow through the thin metal Triumph: Skill issue, got more skilled. Also used L extrusions as backing

Challenge: 3d printer was taking forever to print the Rack for the Rack + Pinion Drive Triumph: Waited longer... but also re-designed the rack to be laser cut

Challenge: Grinding wheel got ground down to a nub Triumph: Pulled an all nighter and went to Home Depot as soon as they opened at 8am