A Year 9 student has won a national engineering competition for his automated sprinkler system which scans for light, humidity, temperature, rain intensity, wind speed and soil moisture before watering plants.
Sabiqul Hoque is a student at James Ruse Agricultural High School in Sydney. His prototype invention won him the Made By Me national competition, which is a collaboration between eight top universities and Engineers Australia. The competition aims to highlight engineering as an attractive career for young men and women.
According to Hoque, he was inspired by the standard sprinkler at his school, which is timer based.
"It sprinkles water even when the plants don't need it," he explained. "So we mostly run it on manual, and turn it on when water is needed. But if we forget, plants can go for days without being watered."
Commercial off the shelf sprinkler controllers, Hoque found, were expensive, and only had limited sensors that had to be bought separately. These systems were only able to detect rain and soil moisture.
He decided to build a truly automated, smart sprinkler system that would know temperature, relative humidity, soil moisture, rain intensity, light intensity and wind speed, before deciding to water. By determining wind speed, the sprinkler system could ensure that the water is not cast too far from the target.
Hoque built the prototype over two months, hand-drawing circuit diagrams for each of the sensors, then building and testing each one sequentially. He used standard electronic components, wired together on a solder-less breadboard.
Hoque's agriculture teacher suggested using an Arduino micro-controller to manage the sensors, so he bought one, learned its IDE software, and programmed it with all the variables. He set thresholds for temperature, humidity, soil moisture and brightness which would determine when the sprinkler should activate, and when it should shut down. To supply the water, he modified a windscreen wiper pump to work with the circuitry.
“If the average temperature is above 20˚C, it counts this as a high, so it knows to turn on the pump – unless the soil is already wet from rain,” said Hoque. “The light detector indicates if it’s day or night; if it’s night and it’s hotter than 20˚C and humid, the sprinkler will come on because the plant needs it.”
After experimenting with his apparatus to ensure each of the components worked, he tested it on two different plants. Over 30 days, a grafted palm tree watered by his system grew 6.4% in height, while a mango plant grew 37% to 22cm in height.
The Made By Me organisers determined that Hoque's system was based on sound agricultural knowledge and showed a real talent for good engineering.
[Sabiqul Hoque, a Year 9 student at Parramatta’s James Ruse Agricultural High in Sydney, with his automated sprinkler system.]
There will be a panel discussion on 'Developing our next generation of engineers' at the Australian Engineering Conference 2016 in Brisbane on November 23-25.