Are you growing vegetables?
You might already know that it’s important to water your garden once in a while.
Vegetables need to have a certain amount of water each week in order to grow. How much water is enough and how much is too much?
Can you figure out how much water your favourite vegetable needs in order to grow?
Let's grow tomatoes!
Build this tomato-meter.
It will tell you whether you need to water your tomato plants.
If you have enough time, build your own design.
Try your tomato-meter before calibrating it.
To check that everything works correctly:
- Play the program to move the needle from left to right.
- Look on the Hub to find out how many degrees of motor rotation it takes to go from one end of the scale to the other.
- The number may vary slightly between models. Your Hub should display a value between 300 and 600 degrees.
- You can use the Absolute Value Block to make sure that the ‘degrees of motor rotation’ value is a positive number.
Show how much rain will fall today.
Insert a sheet of paper that’s been pre-printed with the tomato scale.
Find a way to move the needle in proportion to the amount of rain that should have fallen during each hour of the day.
The length of the scale on the paper is d=90 mm, which indicates that it’s rained 1 mm, so you should rotate the motor 450° to indicate 60 mm of rain or 7.5° to indicate 1 mm of rain. Your program could look like this:
Should you water the garden?
Extend your program to cover the whole week (7 days) and evaluate whether your tomato garden will get enough rain. Tomatoes need about 50 mm of rain per week in order to grow successfully.
Now, display temperatures.
What? You don't like tomatoes?
Change the scale to display the expected temperatures over the next 5 days. Evaluate whether there’s something else that you could plant.
Seeds only grow when the temperature is right for them to germinate.
Find out which seeds can germinate at which temperatures.
Think about how you did.
What did you do well? Is there something that you could have done better?
Now you can use this life hack to grow your love of veggies!