About the Project
The hydroponics team is working under Dr. Marshall Porterfield of the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department at Purdue to develop a hydroponics system that is capable of growing and harvesting nutrient rich plants. One of their main goals is to develop a way to automate almost all aspects of the cultivation and harvest of the plants. The objective is to make a universal hydroponics system able to grow virtually any plant or grain to support analog astronauts in the ASTRO-USA habitat.
Several sensors will be used for the hydroponics project, including PH, upper and lower bound water level, dissolved oxygen, electrical conductivity, and water temperature. An Arduino Nano is used to control and monitor all of the sensors attached to the system. We are looking into installing grow lights on the hydroponics setup and connect it to the microcontroller so that they can also be automated.
