Makerspace at the Fulton School
Hydroponics Tower
For this project the main things I did were help design and build the actual structure of the hydroponics tower and code the programs that run the pumps and the LEDs that run with them. I spent the majority of the time making multiple different programs that all do slightly different things with the pumps. One program runs the pumps on a daily cycle while the other makes it so you can turn the pumps on for a specified duration from a local website of the command line. I did not set up the website but I created the python program that ran the action communicated for the website.
The LED program went pretty well. I thought it was a lot of fun to make the LEDs dance up and down the strip. I spent a lot of time (probably too much) trying to make the LED colors make a cool pattern while it pumped. Running the pumps themselves also went pretty well.
The list of things that did not go well is actually shorter than expected. The main problems were little errors in the code that would take a long time to sniff out. The only one of those that is still a problem at the moment is one that makes all the lights go bright white after a keyboard interrupt or other error. We couldn’t figure out what was causing this and it doesn’t actually mess any of the core functions up so we are leaving it for now.
I learned a lot about python and the job specific functions that we needed to use but the more important things I learned were just the broader skills involved with a big project like this. The first was how quick I have gotten with the basic commands in terminal. I’m sure this will apply to other programing projects in the future and I feel like I’ve become much more proficient with it. The other thing was how good I got at looking up styling and other things online to the point where I was able to teach myself a lot of concepts. This pretty much tears down any boundaries that exist because I can now teach myself most things I will need to know for future projects.
I probably would’ve tried to spend more time trying to solve my problems instead of waiting for the teacher to help me everytime. Early on in the project, anytime my code gave my an error message I would just get annoyed and wait for my teacher to help me fix it. As it went on, I got better at fixing my errors by inspecting my code and by googling syntax for the language I was using. Even though I still needed my teacher for some things, I was able to solve most of my problems on my own.
One Comment on “Hydroponics Tower”
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You should put a link to the github repository for the project. You may also want to explain why it’s hydroHome2 instead of just hydroHome, but I’ll leave that up to you.
You may also want to put in a line or two at the top explaining what the project actually was (or you could link to Max’s post which has a good general introduction to the whys of the project).