Eadin’s Agritech Project

Introduction and aim of the project

For final project, I would like to extent what we have learned about urban farming technologies to a broader conceptual framework, to discuss certain social issues and make the best of technology in this process. Ultimately, I wish to stimulate more of people’s awareness and reflection on food, what we consume every single day.

Concept

The system represents the interplay between we human and food farming processes. Every 5 minutes, the system fetches a piece of food news, analyzes its content and translates its positive/negative level to the aeroponic (in air without soil) system’s lighting color and intensity, and price of the food grown. This highlights our collective sentiment and global events happening around food, and how they act back to what we cultivate and consume. Thus, I want to experiment the multi-way relationships of feeding among humans, data, and food.

Process

At the very beginning, I spent a relatively great amount of time building up and refining the conceptual design. During this process I found technology and theoretical ideas would inspire each other as the idea would not be finally formed if I didn’t know the possibility of fetching news data based on API.

Structure

The final design involves two parts – a aeroponic system of microgreens and a display screen.

Electronics

The project did not focus too much on environment monitoring and automation but rather the News API application and MQTT message display. The displaying screen was achieved by Rasberry Pi. Lights were made with two NeoPixel strips.

Node-red flow

The price calculation

Dashboard

Reflection

This project has been quite an experimentation and exploration for me. There is a huge difference between the first idea I have about making something more than hydroponic systems and the final outcome, demonstrating a great amount of iteration, which is typical for a design as well.

When I look back on the design, the display of light color and price change still appears to be tricky, because of the different common senses we have. For example, more negative news should be associated with red light and higher price, but red has the indication of decrease (but the opposite in China), so it’s hard to keep the complex relationship consistent and straightforward. However I still like what has been accomplished so much, especially how it takes full advantage of technology along with artistic aspirations.

A more minor observation is that the food price usually goes down, meaning that we still have more positive voices around food despite accuracy of analysis, which is good to know! I hope the project inspire people to rethink about our relationship with food, especially in the era of massive urbanization and digitalization.

By Eadin Wang