Plant Bot
Here is the link to the existing project:
https://scistarter.com/project/41-Project-BudBurst
http://budburst.org/getstarted
The citizen science project that we chose to adapt was the Project Budburst. The goal of this project is for citizens to observe plants and submit their data in order to help scientists with their goal of understanding how plants respond to climate changes. We chose this project because it allowed us the opportunity to come up with a new and more convenient means of observational technology. Instead of just using a smartphone to take pictures, we were able to combine Raspberry Pi and a Go pro to take scheduled photos.
By using these tools, it allows us to upload the pictures to twitter. This was we can set it up to take actual live pictures daily of the plant during the budding process. We also added the feature of the weather. With the new setup, it allows everyone to view and watch how the plant changes from day to day.
We purchased a plant from a local store that was in the process of starting to bud. We were able to rent the raspberry pi from the college library and one group member already had a go pro in his possession.
After a couple of days of sunlight from the windowsill and nature care of planting -one of the buds bloomed.
After a few days, the weather was very rainy so the buds were not as lively as before. However, within the next couple of days the sun should be bright again.
We believe that our adaption to the Project BudBurst was extremely successful. Overall everything went as expected, except we did not get to observe our plant for as long as we had hoped. It took us a little longer to adapt the Raspberry Pi to our specific needs and we had a hard time choosing the most ideal plant to observe. However, once we got these aspects figured out, we were able to successfully carry out our project.
One of the limitations that we encountered was that we had to use a plant that we could keep in one of our group members homes to ensure that our equipment was safe the whole time. This being said, we could not just choose an existing plant on campus since it had the risk of being tampered with. We also did not have as much time as we hoped for to be able to grow a plant from seeds. Instead, we had to opt for a plant that was almost blooming so that we could document the flower’s progress.
Future participants would definitely be able to ask questions easier since we were uploading the progress to twitter. This allowed us to really share our results not only with our group members, but anyone else who wanted to follow the growth process of our plant. This really changed the nature of our project because we were able to actively follow the plants progress without having to go to the specific location and take pictures by hand. This also allowed us to collect more data since we were able to program the software to take pictures at specific times through the day instead of us just taking one picture a day. This definitely helped us improve our project overall since it made our results more accessible to each group member and anyone else who wished to follow our experiment.
After completing our project, we were able to learn a lot about the issues with automation and computers. Our “Plant Bot” took about 36 photos that were blown out with light, which is something that would not be acceptable in serious data collection. Even though our system had some difficulties with the lighting, this project would have been extremely tedious to maintain if we had to take the photos by hand multiple times a day. We probably would have been able to avoid the photo quality issues if we had invested in a better camera instead of using a Go Pro. Overall, we were able to see firsthand how difficult it can be to manipulate computers to complete even the simplest of jobs.