Smart home

The Project

Me and my team have created the project 'Smart Home'. Smart Home consists of 2 sub-projects: 1. Plant Watering System 2. Automated Lighting System 1. The automatic plant watering system waters the user's plants automatically while they are away and works on the basis of a simple timer based design. The user can input an interval in the keypad and the servo motor will move at that specific interval, thus allowing/blocking the flow of water(present in the bottle/ water outlet) according to the user's requirement. The timer interval selected by the user is also displayed on an LCD screen for clarity. This project is also very sustainable as it waters plants and re-uses single-use plastic bottles. 2. The automatic lighting system is a simple yet an incredibly useful system as it works towards saving electricity therefore making it sustainable. The base of this project is the PIR sensor(Passive Infrared Sensor) which detects human motion. This serves 2 purposes: 1.Convenience of the People and 2.Saving Electricity. Whenever the user moves, the 2 PIR sensors fitted on the project detect this motion and turn on 3 LEDs. Both of these projects are very affordable and can be made accessible and both of these can be implemented on a larger scale which can serve more people. Also these projects except for the electronics have been made out of re-cycled cardboard. Our project covers 4 SDG goals in total: SDG number 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy SDG number 9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure SDG number 11 - Sustainable Cities and communities SDG number 13 - Climate Action

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Team Comments

Why we made the project: The Automatic Plant Watering System ensures plants receive the right amount of water at the right time, saving water and eliminating manual irrigation. It pairs with the Automatic Lighting System, which detects motion to light up the area, preventing nighttime tripping 

Difficulties: In the Plant Watering System, the only problems that we faced were the management of wires and cables. Whereas in the Automatic Lighting System, the problem that we faced was the calibration of the PIR . We eventually resolved the following problem by testing the sensors beforehand

Things we would have changed: If we could do anything differently we would have: 1. Pre-Calibrated the PIR sensor for the Lighting System 2. Made better fittings for the servo motor on the Plant Watering System. 3. Better cable management for both of the projects.