Day 6
Most of our morning was spent brainstorming which additional supplies to purchase from Lowe's and Petsmart then a trip for purchase. We also met with Vandham to discuss the tanks control valve and overall design of our tank. The control valve will be integrated to the fish tank's outlet that bleeds to plant bed enclosure. This control system will work with a depth sensor located on or in the surface of fish tank. Water Displacement will kick start the control.The system will still allow for continuous water flow so appropriate water conditions for fish and plants are still met.
We finished our ebb and flow in our plant bed using the PVC attached to the bulk head. We then drilled holes into a PVC that enveloped the ebb to prevent the clay pebbles from entering the ebb.These clay pebbles will serve as our plant medium. To allow us to grow our plants we purchased styrofoam which we will cut holes to place plants into. The roots will grow down towards the water. One of the last things we did for the day was to add the water pump to reversoi/sump. We used a clamp to constrain the hose to fish tank and a 1" pvc to add stability to hose.
Our next steps are to add plants and more fish and finally run the system. We can then use the sensor cluster to monitor water conditions. We also need to access data remotely; Sharron let us use her laptop for this. We will compare our PASCO data collector to that of a sensor cluster. The control systems will also need to testing.
In the afternoon Dr. Fu and Dr. Acevedo spoke about wireless sensor networking/monitoring using an arduino and UNT's environmental centers.
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