NU - AutoAquaponics

Now that the majority of our team members have returned to Northwestern's campus, AutoAquaponics has shifted its focus to building the plumbing and electronics portion of this project. We also welcomed Marcos, Anna, and Kaitlyn to our team, and we were thrilled to have them join this quarter and contribute to AutoAquaponics both virtually and in person. As a result of everyone's effort, we successfully manufactured two 24 gallon grow beds out of lumber and plywood. In Spring quarter, we will coat the grow beds with epoxy to waterproof them and get them ready for our plants, and build a much larger, 110 gallon container out of glass and wood for our fish tank.

Everyone helping to clear out space and unload materials for our system:

Team members working hard to build the two grow beds:

Completed product:

On top of plumbing construction, we also continued developing the electronic hardware portion of AutoAquaponics, namely a remote controlled outlet strip and an automatic water tester. Next quarter, we will aim to integrate these to our Raspberry Pi's GUI program by having the Raspberry Pi communicate with a number of ESP32 microcontrollers via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). As a result, we will be able to cut down on the amount of hardwiring we have to do and have a more modular and reliable system.

3D printed prototype of a peristaltic pump that can dispense very precise amount of water:

Raspberry Pi controlled outlet strip turning grow lights, heaters, and fans on and off fully automatically:

While the Plumbing and Electronics team rolled up their sleeves for construction, the Software team continued to add more functionalities to the AutoAquaponics GUI. This quarter, we completed the Settings page of the program, which allows the user to specify their preferred environmental parameters, and receive text messages when the detected parameters are not within the "safe" level. They can also enter their email to receive a weekly summary of what the state of the system is. In addition, we began adding subpages that the user can use to control the actuators in the aquaponic system. Eventually, we plan to have one subpage per actuator in the system so users can change their settings to whatever they like without needing to code.

Completed Settings page:

Water Pump page users can utilize to control the system's water pump:

Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for more from NU AutoAquaponics next quarter!

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!

Being the first full "quarter" the AutoAquaponics project is in operation, we were happy to welcome Jazmyn Lu, Christian Colon, Mady Corrigan, Niv Landau, and Diogo Costa to join the team with existing members Mark Galperin and Bill Yen. Being a team that worked completely remotely with members from 4 different time zones (CST, EST, China Standard Time, Western European Summer Time), we faced some logistical challenges. However, we were still able to meet and communicate on a regular basis to develop the software, electronics, and plumbing aspects of AutoAquaponics. At the start of the summer, we mainly focused on the software aspect of this project, and continued to develop a control system program with a graphical user interface that runs on Raspberry Pi using Python. We added settings functionality to the program that allows the user to set the minimum and maximum levels of various water parameters (temperature, pH, TDS, etc.). If the detected value surpasses that bound, then the graph on the GUI turns red, and the user receives a text message from the Raspberry Pi. In addition, we’ve built the UI for the control panel page to the program that will eventually allow users to toggle a Raspberry Pi controlled power strip remotely. The setting and data logging functionality were all being done using CSV files for the summer, and our goal for the Fall is to transition the saved data/configurations to SQLite in order to boost system performance on the Raspberry Pi.

GUI Dashboard (green graph means everything is normal):

Remotely accessing the GUI displaying live data from an iPhone:

Control Panel that will be used to toggle a Raspberry Pi controlled power strip:

Settings page to set the data boundaries:

On the electronics side of the project, we have designed a 16-outlet power strip that can be controlled through the GPIO pins from our Raspberry Pi, and we are currently in the process of applying for funding from the Associate Student Government in order to purchase the materials needed to build the device. Despite many of our members being sophomores and not able to come to campus, we have devised a plan to ship materials to team members, have them build their respective parts, and then ship the parts to one person for assembly. Because some of our members will have access to an established aquaponic system near campus, we plan to deploy our sensor there to test both their performance and longevity. We have a few new sensors that are scheduled to arrive early October, and we are also planning on applying for more funding in order to expand our available materials. The goal for the electronics team in the Fall is to (1) build a Raspberry Pi controlled power strip, (2) build a preliminary housing device for the sensor probes and Raspberry Pi in order to protect them from water/debris as we deploy them in the existing aquaponic system.

Current electronics setup with a Raspberry Pi, an ADC chip, and pH probe:

Last but not least, our plumbing design team came up with a system design for the overall structure of AutoAquaponics, and we are now in the process of turning that design into a 3D CAD model to help us finalize on the exact components we need and streamline the construction process. Since only two of our members are upperclassmen, we expect the bulk of the plumbing construction to occur in the Winter when we will hopefully have more members back on campus. We have included some structural materials (plywood for fish tank construction) in our grant applications, however, so we will also try to begin building this quarter if funding becomes available.

Example of a system component we created in CAD (fish tank we aim to build out of coated plywood and a glass sheet for the window cutout):

Stay tuned for more updates as we expand our team in the Fall and continue to build our system!

Pictured: Top row: Jazmyn Lu, Christian Colon, Mark Galperin Bottom row: Mady Corrigan, Bill Yen, Niv Landau Not Pictured: Diogo Costa