Microgreens sensor systems and E-commerce Website

Project Description:

For the hardware side, the project builds on an Internet of Things (IoT) system of sensors that will monitor several targeted plant growth parameters in real-time. For our project’s specific case, we will be using sensors to monitor the soil and temperature, the soil moisture and the humidity of the microgreen crops. Each of these sensors will be wired and programmed to send data to a microcontroller that will transmit data to a computer. Using this architecture, the project will be scalable. Depending on the size of the farm, a new microcontroller can be added with its own set of sensors and communicate with the computer. This makes it so the project can be implemented potentially on all scales of farms. After the computer receives the data it will in turn share its acquired data with Cayenne; an IoT platform. By doing this, anybody with access to the Cayenne account, can access the sensor information. Making it easy for someone to login into Cayenne from a computer or a phone to access the information from any location. Making it very convenient for a user, instead of having to go to the farm and checking themselves.

For the website, the client wanted a website that they could use to market the company and display all of their products. To do this, we used two pages for the website, a home page that displays some background information about the company and what kind of products they can buy, and a products page that shows the individual items and their descriptions. To design the look of the webpages, we used a software called NicePage that allowed us to drag and drop html objects into a page and export them to html without the hassle of writing any complex css or javascript ourselves. Once we had the pages designed, we imported them to an IDE to edit the text and images on the page, and to add some final touches. We used a flask which is python based micro-framework, which is a basic MVC format for the website. Originally, we were planning on using AWS(Amazon Web Services) to host the website, but since the website doesn’t need much storage or much REST end-points, we decided to use Netlify instead. Netlify is a free service with a Git-based workflow and serverless platform to host sites.

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