Enviro Mesh

The Project

We designed Enviro Mesh as a low-power wireless environmental monitoring system that collects data from remote sensor nodes and sends it to a central unit for processing and storage. It measures temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, soil moisture, light, and battery level, making it useful for long-term monitoring in places like gardens, farms, and environmental research sites where manual checks are inconvenient. Our system is built around two main parts. The smart sensor node uses a tiny RP2350 microcontroller connected to a BME280 sensor for temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure, a grow moisture sensor for soil moisture, a light sensor, and a power level control circuit for battery monitoring. It also includes an NRF24L01+ module for radio communication, a solar panel for a power source, and a battery as a backup. On the receiving side, a Raspberry Pi 4B+ acts as the central unit, collecting, processing, and storing the incoming data. While building Enviro Mesh, we learned how to set up and remotely access a Raspberry Pi using VNC, SSH, and WinSCP. We also gained experience working with SPI, I2C, ADC, digital GPIO, and PFM reading. Another useful lesson was that using both VS Code and Thonny for development on the Raspberry Pi Pico was much more convenient than using Thonny alone. We also learned how to work together as a team for a long period of time, simulate hardware before assembly, and use Git for code management. Overall, the project gave us a better understanding of how real-world systems are implemented. In the future, we want to add a web dashboard for visualizing the data, alerts for unusual readings, and stronger query and analysis features. We also hope to deploy the system in a real garden or field and eventually expand it with more sensors or AI-based predictions.

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