Mechanical (Shadi and Per-Terje):
This week we have worked on the re-design of the battery pack and servo bracket, integrated the smaller parts into the water tank lid cower.
We come back to the old design of the water tank to get some more space to further design on.
Also, we have started to think about the main protective cover around the system. We choose to look to nature for inspiration, at first we choose turtle, but we found that snail is better for the dimensions.
This is the beginning of the last stage of designing and integrating the hardware parts of the prototype together.
Software (Marius):
During this week i have been focusing on testing the crane and water pump on the system. I first started testing the soil moisture sensor to see the different values recieved by the Arduino to be able to see the values on dry soil and moist soil.
The images beneath shows the different test i did on the soil moisture sensor (Fig 01 – Fig 06), and the video at the bottom show the testing of the crane which is powered by a servo motor. The video also shows the activation of the water pump when the readings from the soil moisture sensor are within’ a specific boundry (using values below 850 for the testing).
Soil Moisture Sensor – Test 01 (air)
When the sensor is not in touch with anything but air, the values seem to be between 139 and 140.
Soil Moisture Sensor – Test 02 (soil)
When the sensor is connected with dry soil i recieved readings from 850 – 800. I noticed that i had to apply some pressure to be able to get the sensor deep enough into the soil. This might be a problem that need to be addressed.
Soil Moisture Sensor – Test 03 (water)
When the sensor is in connection with water i recieved values from 400 – 350.
Electrical (Erlend):
This week was spent researching different solutions for the switching mechanism for the water pump. Originally, I had planned out a switching mechanism using n-type mosfet, but seeing as I was not able to acquire this, I scrapped this idea and decided to use a relay module instead.
