Smarter Lawn Watering with Arduino for Water Conservation
Middle-school students design and build an Arduino-based smart sprinkler system to address water waste.
Middle School Students Team Up for an Electronics & Coding Project
As 7th-grade students at the Franklin School in Corvallis, Oregon, Ayush and Virya are both interested in STEM. The school doesn't currently hold a science fair, so these middle school students independently worked on an ambitious electronics project this year aimed at improving water conservation efforts in their community and around the world.
Student STEM and Water Conservation
In sixth grade, Ayush participated in eCYBERMISSION, an online STEM competition, and came in first at the state level with an environmental science project that investigated the relationship between salinity and the evaporation of water. This year, Ayush teamed up with Virya for an engineering design project for eCYBERMISSION focused on smart watering and water conservation.
The team designed, prototyped, and tested an intelligent automatic watering system they call AquaGroBot. The smart system they built "senses the soil moisture level, decides whether the plants need watering or not, and controls the irrigation system or a pump." The students see this type of smart solution as important at the community level (individual gardens and lawns and local green spaces) and in larger agricultural settings (farms).
A Local Water Problem
In thinking about their engineering project, Ayush and Virya started with a community issue. Where they live, they get a lot of rain. They noticed that sometimes people's lawn sprinklers run even when it is raining. For these water-conscious students, the water waste was an obvious problem.
Even at the community level, "this is an enormous waste of this critical natural resource," says the team. Their research underscored the broader scope of this type of water waste. "Nationwide, landscape irrigation uses 9 billion gallons of water per day, and 50% of it is wasted due to evaporation, inefficient irrigation, water runoff, and watering when soil is already saturated (rain)," they explain.
They decided to design a solution to this real-world problem.
Developing Coding and Circuit-Building Skills
Before starting their project, the students had very little exposure to electronics or coding projects. "We had attended summer camps in 5th grade on microprocessors that introduced us to this topic and robotics" they note.
With a smart sprinkler or watering system in mind, they worked through videos in the How to Use an Arduino video series and began prototyping their system in Tinkercad.
The team was systematic in ramping up the skills they needed. "We had not even heard of Arduino or related electronics circuitry and programming. We looked at, and studied in detail, the first 7-8 videos in the How to Use Arduino [tutorial] from Science Buddies." After working through the basics of using a microcontroller, they moved on to videos focused on specific circuits and sensors they thought they might need for their project, including servo motors, a soil moisture sensor, and potentiometers. Using Tinkercad, they prototyped the circuits they were learning about and then built small test circuits with Arduino before they started designing their composite solution.
As they discovered, moving from virtual prototyping to physical circuits sometimes reveals unexpected problems. "We built the entire circuit involving the soil moisture sensor, the LEDs, the buzzer, the LCD screen, and a motor (as a proxy to pump) in TinkerCad, and everything worked well," says the team. "We then built it on Arduino and found that some parts worked well, and others didn't work well. For example, the pump worked intermittently, and the LCD showed weird characters once the pump was turned on."
At this point, they visited the Ask an Expert forums, where they got help troubleshooting the LCD problem from one of the Experts in the forums. "Figuring out how to fix this was at times challenging and frustrating," they admit. "Once it all worked, it was very rewarding.
"Learning these new things and also how engineers first model the problem before building and testing was interesting." — Ayush and Virya
The system they designed "senses the soil moisture, displays the soil status (dry, medium, wet) on a screen, provides audio and visual signals to indicate the status, and controls a pump automatically." It also collects and recycles any excess water into a storage tank, further reducing waste.
They tested AquaGroBot on a small house plant as proof of concept, but they envision this as a solution that scales. This could result in smarter water usage, which is especially important in areas with limited water supply or drought conditions.
In the end, the team says coming up with the AquaGroBot name was one of the most fun aspects of the project. They add that it was fun to build complex circuits and programs on TinkerCad and then make them work with Arduino. "Learning these new things and also how engineers first model the problem before building and testing was interesting."
The students have a number of ideas for further developing and improving their system, including using 3D printing for weatherproof housing, using solar energy to run the system, and building a phone-based interface for remotely controlling the system and receiving alerts.
Both students are thinking about STEM career paths, with specific interests in machine learning, math, robotics, and engineering.
Ayush and Virya received an honorable mention for their entry in the state/regional competition for the 2024-2025 eCYBERMISSION challenge.
Try It Yourself!
Students interested in water conservation and smart watering systems can do a similar project using Build a Circuit to Automatically Water Your Plants as a starting point.
"We had not even heard of Arduino or related electronics circuitry and programming. We looked at, and studied in detail, the first 7-8 videos in the How to Use Arduino [tutorial] from Science Buddies." — Ayush and Virya
Thank you to Ayush and Virya for sharing this story with Science Buddies. If you have a story about how Science Buddies makes a difference in your classroom, program, or project, reach out to us at scibuddy@sciencebuddies.org.
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