NU - AutoAquaponics

Northwestern continued its online mode for the Fall of 2020 and kept its first and second years off-campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but that did not stop us from our goal of turning AutoAquaponics into reality! Over the course of this quarter, AutoAquaponics was able to secure both the Wild Ideas Grant (courtesy of the NU Associate Student Government) and the McCormick Student Advisory Grant. Furthermore, we were able to expand our team from just seven people to a total of fourteen members as a result of our recruitment effort. Shoutouts to Daniel, Sandra, Ray, Allison, Larina, David, Ben, and Louis for all of their outstanding contribution during their first quarter in AutoAquaponics! Since many of our new members are CS majors, we have been able to significantly progress the software aspect of our project, and have completed a new Video Stream page in our graphical user interface (GUI) program on top of revamping the Dashboard and Settings page to run even faster and with another cool feature - text messages! With the implementation of sendtext.py into the GUI, users can now input their preferred phone numbers and carriers to receive real-time warning messages when one of the six sensors connected to our Raspberry Pi detects unsafe conditions (defined by the user in Settings). We are also redoing our Control Panel page to make it even more user-friendly and accommodate a slew of new features we hope to implement on the electronics side. For more detail on what our program is capable of doing right now, check out the README in our GitHub repository.

New GUI Dashboard:

Video Stream page displaying live feed from our Raspberry Pi's camera:

New Control Panel format with a sneak peak to what future actuators we will include:

Speaking of sensors and cool features, our Electronics Team has also been hard at work with improving the hardware side of our AutoAquaponics prototype. Namely, we have completed a fully functional environmental monitoring system that works in conjunction with the software described above to log and display sensor values on our GUI. This quarter, we added a bunch of new sensors (measuring water level, water temperature, air temperature, relative humidity, and total dissolved solids on top of our existing pH sensor) to the Raspberry Pi, and put everything together in a laser-cut electronics box that we designed and built remotely. The sensors that we implemented are currently being tested in an existing aquaponic system at the home of one of our members. In addition to developing the “eyes” of AutoAquaponics, we are also working on building a number of actuators, which includes a Raspberry Pi controlled outlet strip, an automatic fish feeder, an atmospheric water generator, and an automatic water tester to help us do water tests for chemicals that are hard for our sensors to detect (nitrate, ammonia, etc.). Similar to the electronics box, we are approaching these builds completely remotely with CAD, home prototyping, and 3D printing/laser cutting. Since most of our members cannot be on campus to build things in the shop, our off-campus members made CAD files instead and sent those to our on-campus collaborators for 3D printing.

Laser-cut electronics box with water resistant sensor ports:

3D printed automatic fish feeder that can dispense food based on weight:

One of our members doing some soldering at home for the outlet strip build:

Finally, our Plumbing sub-team has been continuously refining our overall plumbing schematic, and has successfully been paired with an industry mentor from the ESW Mentorship Program to aid in the design of our overall system and filter. We are now in the process of sourcing materials to build our fish tank, determining what fish species to stock our tank with, and coming up with a clog-free filter intake design. In the Winter, we aim to begin building our overall system, starting with the plywood aquarium.

Overall system/plumbing schematic:

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for our update next quarter!