The problem Unsupervised Hydroponic Agriculture (UHA) solves

The challenges to be solved with this system are the increasing food demand in the world, the need for a market of new sustainable methods of farming using the Internet of Things. Our project gives a new perspective to urban agriculture where people can grow their own food without manually monitoring the plants and if this technique is employed on a broad scale it will tremendously increase the food production rate. Our design will be a fully Unsupervised Mini System in which both the food and nutrients required by the plant will be directly delivered to the plant roots and will be recycled in a continuous cycle using the feedback data given by various active sensors installed in the system. Using these IOT based cloud connected sensors that are used in agricultural development, we can monitor and control various environmental factors in our system such as light, temperature etc. IOT based devices with built in sensors will collect and transfer data over a network without manual intervention. The system is intelligent enough in providing the appropriate control action for the hydroponic environment based on the multiple input parameters gathered. The monitoring of plants can be done remotely using a mobile App.

Challenges we ran into

The testing process for the selection of an appropriate IOT platform was a difficult and tedious one. Finally, we decided upon FIREBASE as it was faster among the platforms we compared.
Our device consists of a pump that works on alternating current (220V). Integrating it safely along with small direct current (5V) operating sensors and microcontrollers was a challenge. 
Developing an appropriate user interface for the application was an interesting challenge.