December 1, 2016 | ProgressTH We've been busy with the rooftop garden, and in the process we participated in a 2-day workshop (FarmHack 1.0) in which we developed a simple automatic irrigation system. It works by opening and closing a small valve using a 3D printed actuator, triggered by a hobby moisture sensor controlled by an Arduino.

The system works and gives us a starting point for scaling it up for the rooftop garden.

The rooftop garden was converted from concrete raised beds to 200L HDPE barrels. Four barrels were cut in half and filled with soil, the fifth barrel is being kept as a reservoir for irrigation.

Next we covered the barrels with bird netting supported by PVC pipes joined together by custom 3D printed joints. We used 1 meter lengths of PVC piping to weigh down the net rather than tie it down. This way, we can just raise it up to work on the garden then drop it back down in place when we're done.

Still to come is an automated irrigation system large enough (and with room to grow) for this set up, a remote monitoring system we can use over the Internet (in case we set up multiple gardens on multiple rooftops in the area) and data logging to keep track of and visualize statistics of weather and irrigation and any other sensors we add over time.

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