Meeting with Your TA

Description

By the Thursday of the third week, you must have a project approved, and should be ready to get working! At this time, you'll need to log into PACE and submit your schedule for the semester. Please be sure to make this as accurate as possible because once it's submitted, it can only be changed manually. Making a block of your schedule red means that you are unavailable during that time.

Once each person on your team has submitted their schedule, your TA will be able to easily check for available times to schedule a weekly meeting. Your TA should contact you, usually by the fourth week, via email, to set up a weekly meeting schedule at mutual convenience. During the first weekly meeting, your TA will assign your team a locker and a lab kit.

Weekly meetings with your TA are required and will be held throughout the entire semester until demonstrations are completed. Your TA is your project manager. The "homework" of the course consists of preparing for the weekly meetings. Your TA will evaluate your lab notebook each week, provide feedback, and recommend improvements. At each meeting you will be expected to present your progress since your last meeting, plans for the coming week, and any technical or administrative questions you need to discuss with your TA. You are expected to arrive on time and prepared to make good use of your time with your TA. Your TA may require that each team member to fill out the Progress Report Template and submit it to them prior to each weekly meeting.

Requirements and Grading

Attendance and participation in weekly meetings is required and will affect Teamwork and Lab Notebook scores. If you can't make it to a particular weekly meeting, it is your responsibility to inform your TA prior to the meeting time and set up an alternate time.

Submission and Deadlines

Your schedule must be submitted by the end of the third week of class and you will receive an email from your TA shortly after. Your first meeting with your TA should be during the fourth week of the semester.

S.I.P. (Smart Irrigation Project)

Jackson Lenz, James McMahon

S.I.P. (Smart Irrigation Project)

Featured Project

Jackson Lenz

James McMahon

Our project is to be a reliable, robust, and intelligent irrigation controller for use in areas where reliable weather prediction, water supply, and power supply are not found.

Upon completion of the project, our device will be able to determine the moisture level of the soil, the water level in a water tank, and the temperature, humidity, insolation, and barometric pressure of the environment. It will perform some processing on the observed environmental factors to determine if rain can be expected soon, Comparing this knowledge to the dampness of the soil and the amount of water in reserves will either trigger a command to begin irrigation or maintain a command to not irrigate the fields. This device will allow farmers to make much more efficient use of precious water and also avoid dehydrating crops to death.

In developing nations, power is also of concern because it is not as readily available as power here in the United States. For that reason, our device will incorporate several amp-hours of energy storage in the form of rechargeable, maintenance-free, lead acid batteries. These batteries will charge while power is available from the grid and discharge when power is no longer available. This will allow for uninterrupted control of irrigation. When power is available from the grid, our device will be powered by the grid. At other times, the batteries will supply the required power.

The project is titled S.I.P. because it will reduce water wasted and will be very power efficient (by extremely conservative estimates, able to run for 70 hours without input from the grid), thus sipping on both power and water.

We welcome all questions and comments regarding our project in its current form.

Thank you all very much for you time and consideration!