“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.”- Janet Kilburn Phillips
My mentor and I have been working on the layout and figuring out what we need over the past couple of weeks. My next task is to keep working on the coding and start to apply it to what we want to do. I have already started planning this process by writing out the tasks my Arduino is going to control and sorting those tasks into what the Arduino needs to do. Doing this it can speed up the coding parts in the future because I already have the parts needed to put together.
These are two examples of some of the parts I have ordered for the assembly of my hydroponic system.
Looking at the top item on the picture on the left, we can see that they are UV LED lights. My mentor and I chose this set of lights because they fit within the grow site. This is helpful to the system because it’s specifically designed for the best UV combination of rays that optimize plant growth.
The second item in the picture is the grow site for where my lettuce can grow. We picked this site specifically because it fits well in the area that we have in my home, and it gives us enough spacing to grow multiple plant tests; in fact, the max number of plants it can grow is 54. Another good thing aboutgetting this grow site is that the holes in which the plants grow are purposefully spaced to utilize the space we have while providing enough room to grow.
In the picture below you can see the basic diagram I have drawn to get a better understanding of what I’m building and what it would look like. Keep in mind that this is a very simple way of looking at what I’m going to make because at the moment it doesn’t need to be overly detailed.
What has been your most difficult mentoring challenge so far? Why?
The main challenge I have found while working with my mentor is trying to work around both of our schedules. Because he is constantly busy, and my weeks tend to be equally full of activities finding when our schedules line up can be difficult. There is also a three-hour difference in time between here and Toronto adding to the scheduling problems we have to workaround. This can make it hard to work on the project on my own and is something I’ve been trying to work on.
What is working well? Why?
I’ve found that the best things so far are that my mentor was able to do the research and understand what we were aiming to do before we started working on this project. This helped me learn a lot more during the process and I think can help me a lot along the rest of this project. Another thing is that I’m still excited to work on the project, and I’m looking forward to seeing the final outcome of this assignment.
What could be working better? How can you make sure this happens?
A problem I have found while working on my in-depth is my ability to stay on task and fully work through the things I have to do without getting distracted. I can make sure I fix this by sticking to the timeline I made at the beginning of this project to keep myself accountable for what I need to do, and when I need to do it. Another way to work on this is by looking at the smaller tasks I have to do, instead of looking at the bigger ones. This can make working less stressful and help me achieve my goals.