EcoTech Intent – TateY, TylerR, & JackL

Summary

In partnership with The Maine Sustainable Agriculture Society, we plan to design the user-interface for an application that farmers could use to monitor and control greenhouse conditions to better the efficiency of their year-round food production systems.

Images:

Using Adobe Xd – sign in screen with basic layout and structure of the app:

(More to come)

Description

Farmers (particularly small scale) are already smart, intuitive, and self-reliant. They have long been leading members of the “DIY” community, for they rarely have all the needed resources or initial capital to make large investments in best gear and the newest technology. They have, for many years, been fine without any type of new media. But the days of this disconnection from technology are coming to an end, as farmers are increasingly seeking new ways to engage their customers, such as having a weekly email newsletter, joining systems like “Community Supported Agriculture” which allows the consumer to subscribe to the weekly/biweekly harvest of a farm or group of farms.

Now, rather than making it easier for the consumer to become more in tune with the farms, we aim to create the user-interface for a mobile application that will allow farmers to become more aware of the conditions of their farm, specifically their greenhouses. With inputs from various sensors measuring essentials for food production such as temperature, light, humidity, air and soil quality, etc. we are setting out to design the interface of a mobile application that will allow farmers to control these essential parts of the growing operation, while recognizing that this needs to be self explanatory and relatively easy to use.

App Components we aim to include:

• Sign-in screen
• Customizable layout of farm and buildings where sensors will be located
• Monitor, Control, Settings, and Customize buttons
  • Monitor
    • Ability to view sensor data from any duration they choose
    • Quantitative data should be viewable in spreadsheet-like format as well visual representations (ie. birds eye view of greenhouse for temperature monitoring, graphs of light)
    • Cameras viewing greenhouses and/or certain beds/areas of greenhouse
      • Time-lapse function to view conditions of greenhouse over several hours, days, weeks, or even months.
  • Control
    • Have full function to modify and schedule any and all remote operations, such controlling windows for temperature and wind flow.
  • Settings
    • Settings panel to set specific maximums and minimums, making the overall greenhouse system full-proof and automatic.
    • Add admins and operators to delegate work
  • Customize
    • This will give the users the ability to customize size of beds, what’s growing in each bed, format and add another greenhouse to the app, etc.
    • Add new sensors in the future and set up controllable aspects within the greenhouse.

Rough budget for: material, time, space needed to build (any materials you use, paying for skill, research, time, labor etc.)