Students present their completed work at the Design Expo at the end of the spring semester. An instrumentation package is needed to provide soil and crop data for closed loop control of a spatially variable center pivot irrigation system. RF linked to a remote receiver for data communications. An alternate IR communications link for communications with a palm-top or laptop computer is optional. The system must be able to store 12 weeks of environmental data including a time stamp that is Y2K compliant.
All data is sampled and stored at a rate of two samples per hour.
1 illustrates the instrumentation needed for this system. Solar powered from a 1 watt, 17.5 volt solar panel. Battery storage with capacity for seven days of normal operation without recharging. 10K ohm or greater.