PF started as a project that I chose to work on during my 3.5 month long Asian Leadership Programme in Zhejiang University, China, last summer.
I had a wonderful time there and I grew to love this concept of a Plant Factory.
The team I worked with was great, my mentors were excellent and I saw huge potential in this concept.
Hence, after a successful summer my team and I decided that we would bring this project back to SG and continue working on it in SUTD.
Initially, we tried for an IDC project which has a significant amount of funds.
We roped in my favorite Prof Man and Dr Koh as our faculty advisers and submitted a proposal to apply research grants.
However, due to some complications with my previous (stupid) robotics IDC our application was stuck for an entire term.
Finally, after one entire term of waiting and dragging Dr Koh suggested that we apply for a UROP instead.
Lo and behold, in just a mere few day we got the UROP.
I was quite pissed off with the IDC side and especially with Dr Mohan.
Mohan suggested the robotics project for my previous IDC but he didn't not help us at all throughout the entire duration of the project.
In the end, everyone gave up as we had no idea how to build a wall climbing robot especially since we were all in year one back then.
Then, he dragged the closing of this shit and till this date I have no idea if the project is even closed yet.
Nonetheless, we got the UROP and had 1k sgd budget to work on the research project.
Prof Man was silently dropped from the project (since it is not longer an IDC) and we only had Dr Koh.
Moving on, we visited Oh's farm and bought some planting materials (such as seed, hydroponics kits and so on) to grow some veggies!
Then we started shopping for electronics, and it was then that we found out that the electronics were insanely expensive.
All along, we thought that the electronics we never a problem since they were cheap and readily available when we did the project in China.
But back in SG, they were so expensive and we had to go all they way to Sim Lim.
With the electronic parts that we bought from Sim Lim and some other non-electronics (such as the plastic boxes) that we bought from Daiso, we started to build the experimental boxes after finishing our final exams.
After one grueling Saturday afternoon, we discovered (in the most painful way ever) that soldering is bitch and building this boxes is not going to be easy.
We also ran out of materials as the LEDs we bought were only sufficient for one box.
Learning from our lesson in Sim Lim, we decided to TaoBao our second batch of electronics.
This turned out to be a huge mistake!
There were so many complications with the electronics that we wanted to buy from China and it took an entire month for them to arrive.
It was so sickening and our project seemed like it was dead since we all started on our internships.
A month later, our shipment was finally here and we hastily started on our project.
As two of us were doing internships, we could only work on this project after office hours on weekday or on weekends.
Build the boxes were tedious and the wiring, soldering and constructing were just plain laborious.
Finally after a few weeks, we were done!
Meanwhile, we also found ourselves a new home (since the security chased us out of the Com Lab) in the Bio Lab all thanks to Dr Koh.
The Bio Lab was amazing, we had ample space, privacy. air-con and we no longer had to be vagrants!
Upon completing the boxes, we started germinating the seeds.
Few days later, we went back and :( not all the seeds germinated.
An entire species of seeds did not germinate while only about 80% of the other were successful.
We had to make do with it and started the experiment with only a few boxes since the plants had already started growing.
Over the next few days, we went back to the farm to buy more seeds and sponges.
Then, we came back and massively sowed them.
We made sure that we sowed much more than sufficient seeds to account for those that would not germinate.
Yeah, at this point I guess you can see how much bad planning we had.
Finally, another week later we went back intending to only do some transplanting.
We thought that the job would be as simple as to move the germinated plants into their boxes as that was theoretically the only task left to to do.
However, like how this project have been, thing will always go wrong.
There was so much work to do since so many connections came loose and lots of other issues arose.
From 7pm we toiled till 11.30pm and we finally completed it!
Yeah after like god knows how long, the plants are finally growing in their boxes! Hurray!
Next up, some picture blogging time:
After the first round of germination
None of the seeds which I sowed germinated :(
while, most of those sowed by Yam germinated.
We were planning of planting two different species in each box, but since none of mine (Cai Xin) germinated. We had to only make do with Xiao Bai Cai.
Beginning with only four experimental boxes since we were short.
A day later, we went back to look at them.
Some of them died so we had to do some transplanting.
Whats left from out first round of germination.
At the same time, we sowed more seeds!
Few days later...
While some of them did not germinate, we had more than enough.
The plants from round one are doing well.
They have grown taller and have more leaves now.
The boxes from round one under normal light.
I'm was really surprised when I saw true leaves.
Finally, all our boxes are done!
Experiment in motion.
That's it for today, alien boxes FTW!
Cheers,
Scott signs off.
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