Planet Monitoring Using Sensors - Senior Design Project

[qmellis]

Hello all,

I'm an EE student working on my senior project, but my group and I are still in the design stage. We're designing a planet monitoring system that measures moisture, sunlight, temperature, and pH, cataloging this information in a database, 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 vision, and I'd be really grateful if any of you could answer some or all of them. Feel free just to address whichever question strikes your fancy. (Hopefully, there is a question that does.)

Thank you all very much.

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 through a switching mechanism?

 

[Laplace]

Have you conducted an engineering survey to determine what necessary technology and components are commercially available versus what you might need to develop, and the associated costs?

Have you conducted a customer survey to determine who might be interested in subscribing to your planet monitoring service, and what their level of technical sophistication might be? What are they willing to pay for this service?

Have you performed a feasibility study to determine whether you can develop a marketable product?

What are your plans for prototyping to avoid unexpected technology or system issues?

Is your senior project supposed to mimic or simulate a real development project with requirements development and economic projections, or is it sufficient that you just assemble a functional demonstration?

 

[qmellis]

Thanks for responding, Laplace (transform, lol. Sorry.).

To tell the truth, this is part of our engineering survey. We've looked at the sensors available and they're all pretty cheap, with the exception of the pH sensor. Other components we may need, op-amps, microcontrollers are also within our range, so we're not worried about cost or feasibility; it can definitely be built by a group of undergraduates. We're just looking for guidance from people with actual experience.

Our consumer survey has gone out to various family members and gardening boards around the web, so we're still cataloging and analyzing the responses.

As for the final device, it pretty much just has to work as described. We would like to take the extra step of making it marketable, but right ow we just want to build something that works.