Resilient Smart Gardens—Exploration of a Blueprint

In an effort to become more resilient and contribute to saving water and other resources, people become more interested in growing their own food, but do not have sufficient gardening experience and education on conserving water. Previous work has attempted to develop resilient smart gardens that support the user in automated watering using simple embedded boards. However, none of these solutions proved to be scalable nor are they easy to replicate for people at home. We set up a student team project that created a safe space for exploring this multidisciplinary domain. We developed a smart resilient garden kit with Internet-of-Things devices that is easy to rebuild and scale. We use a small-scale board and a number of sensors connected to a planter. In this paper, we report on a prototypical implementation for multidisciplinary smart garden projects, our experiences with self-guided implementation and reflection meetings, and our lessons learned. By learning about water conservation using automation on a small scale, students develop a sense for engineering solutions regarding resource limitations early on. By extending such small projects, they can prepare for developing large-scale solutions for those challenges.