We already knew what our project enclosure would look like because we worked it out together on paper. At first we thought about buying premade pots from the store but in the end we decided against it because we believed it might have been hard to modify it to suit our needs (placement of the moisture sensors, Arduino board, wiring). Therefore, we decided to create our own design instead.
The planter is the shape of a box. There's a space below it that houses all the electrical components - we call this the base. The base has a circular cutout to accommodate the PIR motion sensor.
The planter is actually made up of two boxes, one larger (outer) and the other smaller (inner). The inner box holds the soil and moisture sensor probes. It is isolated from the rest of the build to prevent any moisture from making contact with the electronics.
The inner box and base are made up of white opaque acrylic. We felt that this really imbued our project with a touch of modern design. The outer box is made out of a translucent acrylic to allow the LED light to shine through. We bought all our plastic material from TAPs plastics in downtown.
When cutting the sheets of plastic to make pieces for the box, we messed up a lot! We thought we made perfect measurements but we ended up cutting some pieces too short and some too long. We also had to make sure to account for the thickness of the plastic, the placement of the holes for the LEDs, and the size of the PIR sensor cutout. As the deadline grew near, John and Taylor were both absent from the shop (it was actually supposed to be closed) the day we needed them the most. This really stressed us out, but since we had extra plastic, we were able to get by by enlisting the help of some ID students.
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