Episode Four:

Learning to Control Sensors and Getting Data

Activity Card:

This is the activity card that came with your materials. You can learn more about the science and electronics in this episode and view all of the steps and challenges for this week on this card. You can press the "Enter Fullscreen" button to make these cards bigger. Or, you can go here.

LEaFS Weekly activity cards Episode 4 Front
LEaFS Weekly activity cards Episode 4 back

Step 1: Add all of your electronics to your system

This video shows you how to add all of the electronics to your system. Follow along with your instruction booklet that came with your materials as well. If you get stuck, reach out! Send us an email or post on the "Help" page.

Step 2: Control the temperature in your greenhouse using a fan

First, follow along with the video on the right to build the temperature-controlled fan circuit. Look at the activity cards to see what materials you need for this circuit.

After you've built your circuit, click here to follow along with a tutorial to learn how to code a temperature-controlled fan.

Click here to download the complete program (code).

Step 3: Show all of your garden information on your OLED screen

Use what you have learned from programming the micro:bit from the previous Episodes to create a program to show all your data on the OLED screen and change the LEDs color if the data is too high or low.

If you need a little help, check out this code which combines what we have learned in the previous episodes to collect temperature and humidity data, show it on the OLED screen, and change the color of the LEDs!

Try adding other types of data to this program. Note: check out how the LEDs are broken into two sections in this code, one part for humidity and one part for temperature.

Step 4: Start a journal for your plants

Start a journal to keep track of how your garden is growing. You can create a digital journal or print the pages out. Keeping track of how your garden is growing is a good way to learn more about what your garden needs to be healthy.

Don't forget to share your journal and your thoughts about this journal here: https://bit.ly/garden-journal-sharing (you can also find this page in the "resources" section for episode 4)

Journal Writing - LEaFS

You can use the options to see this in Full view.

Challenge Yourself

Pick at least one of these challenges to complete this week. Then make sure to share your experiences and thoughts below

Create

Build an electrical conductivity probe to explore nutrient solutions for your plants!

Code

Try different LED animation patterns controlled by conductivity data from the garden!

Experiment

Make different nutrient solutions to see how your plants do under different conditions!

Reflect

Respond to the prompts at the top of each column by uploading, pictures, videos or just writing about your experiences. It doesn't have to be perfect, we just want to hear what you've been up to.