Common Garden is a revolution in the food industry, bringing in sensors, data, automation, and artificial intelligence. With a focus on precision, cost-effectiveness, and an open source community, Common Garden is helping farmers sense, encode, and replicate the ideal conditions to grow plants.
After communication with trade growers, Hartnell developed sensors that allowed farmers to control temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, light, nutrient concentration, and nutrient pH. These various components are not recorded separately, which is already happening in the agricultural field, but rather together, for full programmatic control.
These controlled environments do two things that are essential for creating a smaller environmental impact: remove herbicides and use fewer pesticides. Not only are you creating organic, nutritious food, it is produced in local areas and can be grown year round. Full control systems have always been around, but most of them are expensive and confusing to figure out. By creating an open source tool, Common Garden has removed the concern about cost and simplified the data analysis so that anyone can use their tool.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
