What We Achieved

We were able to meet our expectations for this project. We successfully created an automated irrigation system that responded to external conditions such as moisture levels and temperature that could be expanded to a larger scale design. The moisture levels of the soil act as a trigger to alert the system that watering will be needed in the future. The temperature algorithm that we are currently using could be changed to a more sophisticated tracking system where more time and data are available; however, we were able to respond to trends and make our system more efficient. The watering amount is also checked by the system after every watering session to identify if more or less water is needed based on the moisture values read after saturation of the soil. These were the goals we set to achieve and the system was successful at implementing them.

Intellectual Property Considerations

The code that we reused for this project were the pt-cornell files provided to us by Professor Watkins and a debounce function created by Craig Lombardo. There were no previous solutions to this problem that inspired us to the point of reverse-engineering, and patents were never an issue with this project. There could be potential for a possible patent since, to our knowledge, there is not a system that both measures the moisture levels of soil along with looking for trending temperature data. The combination of these two conditions is non-trivial and could be very useful to many people.