THE STORY
For my final project, I decided to go for something relevant to where I’m living because I wanted my project to have an added value and contribute in building the economy. Hence, my project idea was inspired from TASMU Smart Qatar program. A program designed to employ the power of innovation and technology to build sustainable and diverse economy in Qatar. In addition, the program aims at enhancing the quality of life by creating technology solutions to improve the public services of the main sectors in Qatar.
These main sectors are :
- Environment
- Healthcare
- Logistics
- Transportation
After exploring the program for a while, I decided to go for an idea related to the environment sector and specifically under the topic of environmental stewardship.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
My project idea is Smart Personal Farming will enable individuals to grow their own plants or crops from within their homes to be used for self-consumption. Personal Smart Farming solution will leverage hydroponic and automated farming technologies and modify it for small scale and personal production which will ease the user's life and minimize costs for consumers.
Objectives
- - Individuals can grow crops for self-consumption.
- - Increase efficiency.
- - Minimize costs for individuals.
The system will consist of a container for farming with a controlled environment with its parameters such as temperature, CO2 level, humidity displayed for the user on a screen. Also, the process of farming will be automated using a robotic arm that will perform different tasks such as planting the seeds and watering the crops.
The user will have the option to choose the desired crop. Then, the robotic arm will take the correct seed from a storage and plant it, and the crop will be monitored by the sensors such as humidity sensor to determine the watering schedule. Finally, when the crop is ready, the user will be notified to manually harvest it.
The sketch below shows my initial and simple visualization of the system.
After preseting this idea to our fab academy instructor, his feedback was really good and motivating. However, he adviced me to break the project into systems and choose one to focus on and build for the fab academy because it might be too complex given the fab academy timeline.
After a good brainstorming session with myself, I decided that my project has two main systems; the robotic arm and the controlled environment. Therefore, for the fab academy, I decided to go for the controlled environment and the process of planting, watering and harvesting will be manual for now.
However, my future plan would be to work on the robotic arm system and to automate the whole system as my initial idea.
This is my sketch after simplifying the project and focusing on one system.
