The Environment Cube! Know the Land Beneath You!

So, the project I am making will be great help to the agricultural field, where we need to run several tests on the soil before we can start plantations.

Now, my EnvironmentCube is a smart cube which just needs to be placed in soil and then leave the rest of the work to the cube. It is equipped with several high quality sensors which will measure almost all the factors that are needed to be considered when we are testing the land.

It will measure the salinity level of the sand, water content, temperature, humidity and the air quality of the surrounding environment which will be a great help.

Now how to access this readings?? Well that's easy, you will get all this measurements on your smartphone app! Now the steps to create this project are :

1) Construct your own 3 D printed cube:

Now the first step is to make the casing of your cube. Keep in mind that you need to fit a small power source for your arduino nano and the Bluetooth module, keep holes for the sensor outlets and make the cube such that you can open and close it whenever you want. I didn't have access to a 3D printer so I cant share an image of the box I used.

2) Hardware Connections:

Now that you have your cube casing ready, lets proceed to the next step. Now connect your sensors the that arduino analog pins and use a extra shield if you require extra analog pins.

I have shown the connections that are required to be made.

Now after the sensor connections, connect the Bluetooth module to the arduino.

After all these connections are done, we are now ready to get our hands dirty with some coding.

3) Software Part-The coding:

Now we need to program the arduino to get the sensor readings and then to send them to our app via Bluetooth. Currently, my project is a work in progress so I am just uploading the sample codes so that you can go and complete your cube!

So, this is it, now you can test the land beneath you!

Future Scopes for this project : The project can be very useful for machine learning applications in which we need the system to analyse the data and give us a result. This cube becomes handy in providing continuous data to the machine.

Furthermore, such cubes can be created for measuring the water quality of different water bodies too just by changing some of the sensors we used.