We’re back!

After spending our time over the past two weeks focusing on finishing our project and preparing to present our results, we are happy to provide an update on what we have been working on.

Since our last blog, we began brainstorming potential designs for vertical hydroponic farming systems. We discovered that it was possible to use the high amount of plastic water bottles our project site had accumulated to our advantage and turn them into a system that functioned while also reusing plastics. We suggested this idea to our sponsors as a method of hydroponics that could be suggested to potential hackathon contestants in the future. Along with this suggestion, we also provided an assessment of the feasibility of farming within the bell tower at H3, the company headquarters. We determined that the surface area within the bell tower could provide substantial volume for produce growth and, if the right produce was grown in this space, would result in a decent profitability margin (These numbers are represented in our final presentation and paper!).

After taking these findings into consideration, our sponsors advised us to focus on building the climate-controlled greenhouse that would house our new automated farming system, FarmBot, once it arrived. We worked with one of our sponsors, Michele Savorgnano, to complete this greenhouse. Unfortunately, due to shipping complications with FarmBot, we likely won’t see the system by the time our project is complete. We planned to automate the greenhouse by building off of FarmBot’s capabilities using the open source code, raspberry pi, and Arduino it offers; since we will not see FarmBot, we will now suggest that future project groups build upon this functionality.

We concluded this past week with our final project presentation. The presentations were held at the SerenDPT’s headquarters, H3, where SerenDPT hopes to house future large conferences, events, and perhaps TED talks. Overall, the presentations went very well for all groups and we were very happy to be a part of such an amazing project. Our group has also been invited back to present at the company’s kickoff event for the grant this coming Thursday! This event is focused around promoting future sustainability efforts and other related topics; we will be sure to provide an update here after the event!