Week 13 - Technical Review & Skype Meeting
So this blog post would be about our current and latest progress so far.
We had a skype meeting with the bosses in charge of this project from Indonesia and we had a Q&A session that helped answer our questions.
Below is a user persona with a list of questions that we have asked and the answers that we received from them.
The user persona
Fuji the Housewife
Age group: Middle aged
Daily Routine: Housework (Mushroom is just a side income)
Technology literate: Normal basic phone with messaging service(2G)
When they will go to the mushroom farm?
Once in the morning to do watering, and another in the afternoon (if it gets too hot).
Harvesting
Everyday, needs 1 month for it to grow out the first batch.
How do they harvest and how the packaging done? Will the harvest yield be sold out for them?
We have asked for a video demonstration. We feel that packaging is unrelated to our project right now. Also, since it is in high demand, we would assume that it will be sold out.
What if this system gives them more yield that leads to wastage?
That would not be possible as mushroom is high in demand currently in the market.
What kinda of preservation technique are they using?
They buy a spawn bag that has been already cultured and ready to grow.
Derive the persona for engineering solutions
Programme the system to send a auto message if the selected parameter is reached(KM & Nat)
Advantage: Easy to notify
Flaws: What if their battery is down for the phone or they never do the watering?
The help that I need from the local students is to find a suitable 3g sim card that can support in that area( For cloud and messaging)
How do we record the yield??
The implementation area
The mushroom house that they call Kubong;
Made from Bamboo and wood
Leaky roof
Wet walls
Damages
Not significant damages
During heavy rain they wall will be wet
The electricity
Should be no problem I guess as our devices got battery pack
Blackouts once a month. Battery life sustainable for at least half a day.
After the skype meeting, we had a slightly better picture of how we are going to carry out our project. During the group progress review with the lecturers, we received a =lot of constructive feedback.
Mechanical design
For the mechanical aspect, we had to come up and finalise the final design of our casing to house the electronics inside. Our initial idea consisted of a wall mounted housing in a plastic box enclosure. However after hearing feedback that it may not be such a gd idea mounting it on the wall, as the rattan wall may deform and wear out. So we may want to look into other mounting methods such as hanging from the ceiling or mounted on the ground.
Here we have our concept design for our finalised mechanical design.
The 'stem' of the housing consists of a PVP pipe which houses an inner mounting board which mounts the other electronics such as arduino, batter pack, etc. The XDK sensor is mounted on top of the pipe's endcap to sense the surrounding environment. It is splashproof protected to a certain extent by a 'bowl' covering above it.
And as for the engineering show, we have made a clear acrylic enclosure box to house the electronics as well as a 'greenhouse' which we made out of pvc pipes and acrylic sheets to simulate the farmhouse in Indonesia. This is to demonstrate the process as to how our system would work.
-Acrylic enclosure for electronics-
-Greenhouse-
Electrical and Software Design
Buttons
There were some questions about the number of buttons. After some thought and discussion among the team, we decided to cut down to number of buttons from 4 to 1.
Our group chose the green LED button.
Its purpose is to indicate that the mushroom harvested is good. There will be a label "bagus" which means good in bahasa indonesian to let the housewives know what the button represents.
Uploading of Data
In our previous reports, we were using Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, it was quite costly and we decided to switch to google spreadsheet.
So our data collected will be uploaded onto google excel spreadsheet. There will be a time stamp, temperature, humidity, pressure, light and yield column.
Notification
During the Skype meeting, we asked the bosses what type of alarm/notification system would the hosuewives like. Through this, we found that their mushroom house is quite a distance away.
As such, our initial idea of using an alarm or buzzer notification system was not ideal as they would not be able to hear it. Therefore, we had to use the SMS notification. The bosses said that most of the housewives had mobile phones with basic functions such as calling and texting.
As such, our final choice was to SMS the housewives.
