Project Description

Project Benefits

This project will primarily benefit client Dr. Tina Ayers and the student technicians who care for the plants in the Teaching Greenhouse. At present, the greenhouse has very little in terms of instrumentation and remote monitoring of safe conditions for the plants. This project will replace an aging and inadequate system which consumes single-use batteries at an excessive rate.

The new system will provide more data with upwards of ten sensors installed throughout the greenhouse facility. In the event that environmental conditions within the greenhouse become unsafe for the plants in either the north or south house, Dr. Ayers and the greenhouse techs will receive a text message warning them of the issue. The current greenhouse conditions will also be made publicly available on this website, which will allow any concerned individuals to verify plant safety from any location, on or off campus.

Additionally, this project will install air mixing fans in the south house to mitigate the undesired temperature gradient that often develops between the top and bottom of the greenhouse. At present, air mixing is provided by running the fan attached to the south house's large glycol heater. The new dedicated mixing fans will allow year-round air mixing without affecting the temperature in the south house.

Team Formation
The team's first step was to define how the team would function.  Several documents were created to define team member responsibilities, standards of work, and methods for resolving personal or professional conflicts.  This occurred in late September of 2021.

Project Sponsor: Dataforth Corporation
The project is sponsored by Dataforth Corporation, based in Tucson, Arizona. Dataforth has been kind enough to provide several modules from their MAQ20 line of data acquisition and industrial control equipment. Thanks especially to John Lehman, Vice President of Product Development.

Project Client: Dr. Tina Ayers
Dr. Tina Ayers is the project's primary client. She is the NAU faculty member in charge of the Teaching Greenhouse and teaches several botany and specialized biology courses. She also conducts botanical research in multiple areas including plant genetics.

Specifying Requirements
In October 2021, the team worked with client Dr. Tina Ayers to define requirements for the project. We discussed various needs and wants with Dr. Ayers.  The full set of requirements can be viewed here, along with a presentation that includes an early block diagram of the proposed system.  The formal requirements were accepted by the team and Dr. Ayers on October 22, 2021.

Prototyping
With the system requirements defined, individual team members worked late in the fall semester to prototype selected components of the project.  Prototyping time was limited by unexpected delays in the purchasing process, but the prototype stage is nonetheless expected to help avoid issues later in the project.

The team prototyped the following components: