HydroGrow

The increase in global population is the main drive behind finding solutions that will sustain our societies in terms of food security. In particular, urban spaces are being transformed nowadays into green spaces. Moreover, more and more people are acting as prosumers rather than consumers with a view to rendering food production more eco-friendly. In this context, hydroponics is emerging as a technique that is proving to be more efficient than traditional growing techniques. In addition, it is more suitable for small scale growing systems and offer an alternative to soil. As a matter of fact, most people often lack the required skills to grow their food hydroponically while ensuring appropriate and maximized growth of their crops. Some of the existing solutions, proposed to tackle this challenge, lack the necessary features required to minimize user’s intervention especially when it comes to identifying the different parameters involved in a hydroponic system. For this reason, “HydroGro” was developed in this capstone project in order to provide a fully automated solution for indoor hydroponic systems. In this way, anyone can autonomously grow plants hydroponically. The system’s architecture was designed around two main parts, namely a hardware and software parts. Specifically, the designed system focuses on collecting the data relating to the different parameters underlying a hydroponic system. Then the data is used to control the equipment tasked with ensuring that all parameters remain within their required ranges during the process of growing crops.

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