Smart Garden

CAD Model

Inspiration

With the growing trends in organic and healthy living, people are becoming more conscious of what they are putting in their bodies. More people are beginning to seek healthier options, but are quickly finding that other alternatives are very costly and even after paying the higher price, realizing that there food is still packaged and shipped many miles from where it is grown before arriving in their local supermarket. While most people would agree that growing their own food would be the healthiest possible option, they do not always have the time or ability to grow their own food.

What it does

Smart Garden is a gardening system that will grow your food for you and notify you via mobile notification when your plants are ready to harvest. The system is fully automated and will monitor the vitals of your plants using smart sensors, making any necessary adjustments to keep them thriving in an optimal environment at all times. Each system is capable of producing enough food to virtually eliminate the produce needs of a small family each month. Smart Garden is the future of healthy eating.

How we built it

Our team integrated sensors into a aeroponic system through an arduino microprocessor. We designed the aeroponic system to be modular to maximize produce yield per square area as well as having a system that will be suitable for different eating habits.

Challenges we ran into

Physical integration of electrical components in a system that transports water is a challenge. Calibrating the smart application to optimize growth of plants.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We won a Product Development & Entrepreneurship competition at UCSD and have received much praise since. We are slowly reaching our milestones, and we are very proud of every accomplishment we make.

What we learned

We learned that cohesive, functional, aesthetically pleasing design takes a lot of collaboration and many iterations.

What's next for Smart Garden

We hope to finish our final prototype this summer and will start pitching to venture capitalist investors as well as launching a kickstarter. Eventually we hope to build big smart garden outfits for larger scale agricultural farms. We also want to start a social justice movement by placing these systems in developing countries, where the systems would help the locals optimize their produce yield. In the future we also hope to penetrate the smart home market with much more integrated systems.