SerDuino 2.0 is a greenhouse set developed and built by 6 third- grade students that attended the Italian school in Bologna IC9 – “Il Guercino”(http://www.ic9bo.gov.it/) and a STEAM laboratory organized and conducted by Luca D’Agostino, the professional educator and Maker.
The greenhouse set was developed in an out-of-school workshop during the school year, totaling 20 hours of work. The school “Il Guercino” has a real greenhouse where a lot of laboratories and activities for the students and the scholars take place. The 6 students & makers teamed up for the SerDuino project with an aim of creating a prototype to improve the school’s greenhouse.
Can the greenhouse be equipped with intelligence? The answer is yes. And it naturally should require building a set and programming it to adjust to the environment when things go wrong.
Before the coding session, the young makers spent time on researches to identify the most important features they were looking for in a greenhouse. After some documentation work they decided to include a temperature and humidity sensor to control the habitat inside the structure: when the temperature goes over 30°C, the set will automatically open to reduce the temperature. By using two servo motors to form a tilting system and a fanning system, they were able to get the set to open four windows, and cool it off.
With a light sensor, they can control the light intensity to turn on four RGB LEDs when it is too dark.
In order to monitor the climate inside of the greenhouse, all data could be read on a TFT LCD screen that reports information about temperature, humidity and light intensity.
SerDuino Greenhouse Set Uses a TFT LCD screen to monitor temperature, humidity and light intensity.
The students worked the programming part with mBlock and the hardware part with various boards and components from the Makeblock platform. Before assembly, the students took exercises to learn some needed skills to improve the final project and augment the possibility of learning. 6 students were divided into 3 smaller ones and engaged in all the exercised proposed by their teacher, Luca. #coding robot
The system includes:
SerDuino:
1 Me Uno Shield with Arduino R3 Board
1 Me LED RGB Module for light
1 Me Temperature and Humidity Sensor for reading data inside greenhouse
1 Me Light Sensor for turning light
1 Me TFT LCD Screen – 2.4 Inch V1 for reading data sensors
1 Me RJ25 Adapter with two servomotors for open tilt ports
Some parts 3D printed
The final work:
See the SerDuino Greenhouse in action:
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