Indoor Irrigation Project - Technical Blog

Indoor Irrigation Project - Use case of IOT(Internet of Things)

What when you are out of home on a long holiday or if you forgot to plant you trees from a long time and you love doing indoor and outdoor gardening but don’t have time to water  your plants due to busy schedule.At present IOT (Internet of things ) is one of the most interesting topics.Many companies are working on IOT to provide smart gardening solutions and  i can name some of them here. 

1. Greenopia - They are developing smart pots for planting your trees as well as they provide online advice  for planting different trees. Based out of Bangalore, they raised money via crowd-funding and people all across country supported them. 
2. Clickandgrow - Another smart gardening kit like greenopia. 
3. Edyn - Earlier know as SoilIq, i saw their website almost 2.5 years back when their founders were explaining there product in some event and from then they had grown a lot. They provide solar powered solution for smart gardening coupled with their app.  
4. Daisy  - A project hosted on Indiegogo for smart watering of plants. 
5. Plantlink - A wireless soil moisture sensor coupled with a central coordinator for smart watering of plants. 
6. Biptonics -   provide their smart router and cloud to which you can plug you own sensor or provide your own readings and manage your garden from a web-browser. 
7. Botanicals - Smart gardening kit by sparkfun - https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10334
8. Koubachi - A wifi based plant sensor which measure T, RH and Lux , determine the need of the plant and send notification based on them. 
9. Cooking hacks open garden project - They had provided a excellent document on how to use their hardware along with software to make a smart indoor garden using Arduino. 
10. Instructables for Indoor Gardening - A open source platform where people share their ideas and work . This section is devoted to Indoor gardening. 
11. Click and Grow - A project based on Spark wifi module for smart gardening inside your house in a mobile garden. Interesting project. 
12. Groove Ecosystem - A complete grow bed which provide you a indoor garden coupled with LED grow lights and a aquarium, connected via Wifi to a cloud server which provide you, your garden data in real time on a app. App has many features like you can get to know the health of your plants by taking a pic. 
13. Niwaone - A similar kind of project like Groove.

What i am sharing here is a project which i did almost 2 years back on Indoor Gardening based on IOT - Internet of things. Internet of things let you access real time data from anywhere using internet. Data from the environment is sensed by the sensor , provided to the controller. Controller then transfer the same data to the cloud using any communication option like GPRS, Wifi, Bluetooth etc to the cloud server. From cloud server the same data can be published using Android application. 

I did this project  using bluetooth communication. I used open source hardware Arduino,  HC-05 bluetooth module, relay , soil moisture sensor, 16x2 LCD and a dc water pump to water the plant. Below are some of the components which i used. 

And below is the whole set-up which i did.

You can clearly see the LCD displaying the values of moisture of the soil. The readings of the Soil moisture sensor are send to the android application using bluetooth and depending on user , a DC motor can be turned ON or OFF. But this lead to a limitation of user interaction and that is why 2 modes were provided, fully autonomous mode, in which you can set up range, so that is moisture goes below the  range, DC pump will be turned ON automatically. 

Generally when dealing with the smart gardening or IOT based indoor gardening, there are basically 3 parameters which need to be monitored and measured. 

1. Soil Moisture - This need to be calibrated by planting the sensor in dry soil and then measuring the sensor readings and then planting the sensor in wet-soil  .Depending on the readings we can provide water to the plant using a small water pump controlled by the Arduino via relay. 

         Soil moisture sensor à Arduino à Relay à Water Pump.

1. Surrounding Temperature and Humidity - Surrounding T and RH play a major role. These parameters also need to be maintained. For  a DIY purpose DHT22 or DHT11 will work perfectly fine.   
2. Lux  or light intensity  - This can be measure using ISL29023 sensor.

          ISL29023 flux sensor à Arduino à Relay à Florescent lamp.

 Here is a screenshot of the app which was developed by Ravi Kumar who is a friend of mine and a professional Android app developer. I am sharing git repo link for the code used in this project . 
https://github.com/shailendra0408/Indoor-Irrigation-Project-

 Below are 2 videos which demonstrate the working IIP project. 

                                     

Initial Marketing and Sales Strategy for start-ups

Start-up Gyan - Some Initial Sales and Marketing strategies for startups. 

Being one of fan of Steve Jobs, i will start with a quote(Source), quoted by him for people who simply love what they do in their job either you work in a start-up or a corporate world. Well being working in a start-up where you don't have a defined responsibilities unlike that in a corporate. And of those, if you are working in a hardware startup,  your responsibilities increase. Starting from finding a nail in busy SP road or a fabricator in Peenya or finding a PCB manufacturing guy in Vijaynagar or finding a corporate customer across nation(Sales) or marketing your firm across facebook or twitter or linkedin or instagram, you have to participate in everything. Well of all, Marketing and Sales are one of the key areas where more focus is required. Being in a start-up, i find it worthwhile to share  some of my experiences which might be useful for my fellow mates in the same field, although thoughts put here are quite common. 

Any start-up in its early stage of bootstrapping have a limited budget of marketing as most of it is consumed in product development that include salaries, office space and other related stuff. So i will focus my blog mainly on the bootstrapping stage where marketing is not given much of the budget unlike in corporates where modes like PPC work a lot.  Generally at  this point of time, digital marketing and some PR do the work. When we talk about digital marketing we talk about posting on various social media platforms like facebook, Google+, twitter, instagram, quora i.e. where we are socially active. So as per me, these social media platform would be the first goal for starting digital marketing. 

(1) Facebook - Post regarding your start-up and product you are making in the related pages, communities and groups. Ask you friend to promote your page. Use all your connection. "Yes" be blunt, you might be making your personal life to commit suicide but all is fare in start-up(On a funny note, generally people keep their private life separate from professional). Always  post relevant article and always don't market yourself or otherwise you will be banned from the group. Don't spam. Also always tag important parameters inside your post, it help you getting shown in result when someone search for it. 

(2) Google +  - With Google putting effort on Google+, its quote interesting platform. #Tagging is must here and believe me, it help a lot in google SEO. I am speaking this with my personal experience. Become part of the communities in the google+ is a good start.  

(3) LinkedIn -  For getting in touch with people who are more interested in technology, LinkedIn is a good platform. A good amount of technology oriented people and people who are specialized in their spectrum generally hangout here, so there is a good probability of your start-up getting viewed by corporate bosses. 

(4) Twitter - Twitter is just like making your native followers who are really interested in your work. Now Twitter has also started its marketing and some people some how provide followers and ask for money, but believe me, twitter is a place where you like to have your own followers. #Tagging work here too. 

(5) Quora -  Quora is a also a place where many people hang around but it is considered not a very productive place. Having your team blog here and sharing your experiences work. I hadn't done any marketing 

(6) Youtube -  Uploading some of the videos related to your product help a lot in attracting your customer towards you. You can explain a idea or product in a better way using a video as compared to a article. Platforms like Powtoon help you create free videos upto some limits. 

(7) Slideshare -  Slideshare, a sister platform of LinkedIn. It is also a major platform which indirectly help you do your start-up SEO in the same platform using #tags. More clicks and more audience and people who hangout on slideshare are not like the audience on FB, they are equivalent to those of LinkedIn. 

So this is about some of social media platform where i had some experience. There are  more platform which  are quote famous but i don't have any relevant experience of the same like PINTEREST and INSTAGRAM

Some other way's of doing free digital marketing 

(A) Forums related to your start-up and explaining about your product

(B) SPAMMING (oops, i hadn't done this , but if you have a mailing list of your prospective audience, you can try that). MailChimp help you do so easily. It help you create beautiful templates either by using their UI or if you talented enough  then uploading your own HTML. 

(C) Blogging -  Writing blog about your start-up and sharing them on the Social Media platform is a also a good way to do digital marketing. If some one from your team know SEO, Blogger can itself can provide you a good reach. Here is the blogger help on the same and one more blog to do SEO in your blog.   

(D) PR - Getting published in some of the start-up related sites like YourStory and others give your start-up lot of traction in the eyes of people working in startup eco-system and VC's and believe me, mouth-to-mouth marketing is the most effective marketing. Get in touch with bloggers who write about start-up domain and domain in which you are working and tell them your story. Every reporter want a story to write, if your startup seems interesting to them, they will write about you. 

(E) Participate in Hackathons and Related Events -  when you talk about your start-up in these events and hackathons, it leaves a long lasting impression. So take part in as many as possible events and talk about yourself. Do chest beating about your product and be confidence (For your reference over-confidence and confidence are two different things ). 

Well at last, it all marketing depend on what kind of product you are developing and how effective it is. Is is really changing life of some people around you and making it simple. More impressive your product is, more effective will be the marketing as it is all about your start-up. 

So this all about Marketing. I didn't discussed about sales, as it is really a complex thing. I would only like to say few words about sales at start-up stage where you are the one who is making the engine from scratch "talk to more and more people and that is the best thing you  can do". Marketing lead sales take some time to play it roles but don't wait for that, wiite more and more mails and talk to more and more peoples. 

I might have missed many points, but this is all i have to share at present. Have a good day. Happy start-uping .........

The Ninja technique for concentration - Some Gyan

                          Self trained imaginary ninja warrior technique for your self concentration 

Just some more gyan session, although i am not a philosopher and neither i want to be nor i am a psychologist treating any of the patients, but i think this technique of mine can be useful for many of the people like me who always lack concentration.   

Just some time back i was talking to one of my friend who is passing through a bad phase of breakup and really when someone is really into a relationship, it effect him/her, what ever other say. No one can feel the same what that guy feel and you bloody can't do apart from doing the same gyan session on how things work in this world, keep on moving, things will work out blah..blah..blah and you know that the other guy don't give a shit about what you are saying because deep down he/she is in ocean of grief.

Suddenly a point came to my mind. I generally use this to just cut off some unexpected or unwelcomed thoughts who always find a way to my mind whereever i am  and i  cannot do anything but i want them to stop. So here is what i did to make them stop running my concentration.  

I build up two imaginary friend of mine in my mind. 2 trained "Ninja's"(for me cartoon character will work, i don't want the real one....). Movies which i had seen, they are the best fighters and they have best concentration powers. So i trained them and when ever i feel that some unwanted thought is coming to my mind and i am unable to control it and seek help, i ask for help and the very next second they are there with their swords, cutting the thought into pieces and flushing it out of my mind and i really find it useful and effective.

And i told the same concept to my friend and i hope that i would help my friend alos and then i thought of putting this up in my blog. Idea worth sharing....