Checkout, Awards, and Pizza

Description

Checkout Day usually occurs on Reading Day after Final Reports have been turned in. You'll need to turn in your lab notebook, return all of the major parts belonging to the university to your TA, and make sure that nothing is missing from your lab kit before you will receive a grade in the class. After Checkout, a short Awards ceremony will be held to honor those who, in the course staff's opinions, have managed to deliver exemplary projects during the semester. Immediately afterwards, you are all welcome to celebrate your project completion with free pizza and soda with the rest of you classmates!

Requirements and Grading

The Checkout Form will be your documentation that you turned in the lab kit - both you and your TA need to sign it before you turn it in to your TA.

Submission and Deadlines

The specific date and time for lab checkout can be found on the the course calendar.

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!