Robotic Gardening M-Term

 Today was one of the most eventful days of the m-term. After a week of problems regarding the way the bot moved from end to end, we discovered this was due to a nut that was not attached properly to one of the carriages, resulting in a near-complete disassembly. We continued to add and remove features, further refining the bot. One feature we added was lights in the computer case, actuated by a button, so we could see what was inside. We also tested the water delivery system, which uses a water tank and a pump to deliver water to the bot. We also continued to 3d print cable holders to hold the power and water carriages. Unfortunately, we still have not integrated everything yet as we had to disassemble and reassemble it, but we will do that tomorrow!  

 Alexander McGill     Today, we started off the day working extremely hard on adding limit switches to the FarmBot. We had to do hours of soldering in the morning, because we had to add 8 wires, some of them being extremely long. Even though we used to love soldering, by the end of the morning, we had had enough.  Our soldering table     After lunch, we began the process of adding the limit switches to the FarmBot with our new wires. The limit switch's purpose is to limit how far the robot can go on each axis by sending a signal to the computer. While this may sound simple enough, it was extremely difficult because, for some reason, the limit switches decided to break halfway through! After looping the wires through the entire robot, and adjusting the settings on the switches, it finally worked so the robot didn't fall off its base.      After a hard day's work, we're ready to move the bot outside! 

 I arrived at school late and caught up with my group as we put the garden bed in place. We moved it from the left side to the right, and eventually decided the bed would look best in the middle. I marked the post's spots with spray paint before we started digging. This ended up being the most time-absorbing task of the day since we had to move all the posts multiple times due to them being unaligned. After many tries and many rounds of squaring and leveling, we were able to complete a flat base to our garden bed and lay down our dirt. The second level came much easier as Ben and Alexander constructed it before, allowing us to place it on top with much more ease. After that, we drilled the boards into the posts, added all our 20 pounds of dirt and cleaned up the garden. Tomorrow we're planning on adding the top half and the robot. - autumn blanton Me squaring the base of the garden bed Some of the materials we used today  Alexander cutting open this bag of dirt but he was strug

       Robotic Gardening Day 5      For day 5, everyone was excited to continue working on the FarmBot after we moved it to the floor on Thursday. We started the day off with some maintenance work on the bot, adjusting the rails and the belt to make the gardening robot run better. The work got a little tedious but once we got the robot running smoothly it was all worth it. We only had a couple of crises today that we had to deal with, the main one being when the belt that moves the farm bot got completely messed up, which took a good chunk of the day to fix. At around 10:00, Mr.  Beradino taught us how to make cables by sauntering and using heat shrink tools, and we applied these cool skills to make wires for the water sensor. We also had 3 students from the Art of Cooking M-Term, who were waiting for their pizza dough to finish so they passed the time by helping us manage the FarmBots various cables and switches. Ben and Autumn making cables      After lunch, we set began programming

     Today we received most of the things we ordered from Amazon and all of our things from The Home Depot, including the wood, water pump, and hundreds of pounds of garden soil. Most of our day was spent devising a way to measure the amount of water in the rain barrel, as we will not be using water from the tap. The water sensor (in the tank) will be connected to the Arduino computer in the FarmBot and give us readings on the computer. We tested using a water glass as the bot was still inside. After some trial and error, we eventually came up with a sequence that would take a sensor reading every five minutes. If the water level is less than a certain number (in this case, below 200), it sends a warning notification to the FarmBot app and email. This way we will know when to fill the rain barrel if it doesn't rain.       After figuring that out, we programmed two of the three custom buttons on the FarmBot, one to return to its home position, and another one to shut down the bot

 This morning started with reviewing the parts beside the robot we needed to assemble. The shed for the robot, the water pump, and the rain barrel were all things we needed to consider before anything was started. We also got our bill of materials approved by Dr. Q which was very exciting and easily a highlight of our day. After that, we began to connect to the robot through the website which ended up being a challenge that we solved by re-flashing the SD card on the Raspberry Pi. When we went through the checklist and started to move the robot around we noticed a strange clicking sound from the tracks. We found out that the wheels were too close to the tracks and were too tight, so loosening the wheels on all of our axes solved that problem and let it move smoothly. We spent most of the rest of the day running the robot across the track and solving more problems with the track alignment. These problems were mostly caused by our farmbot being only on a makeshift version of a garden bed