CSCE Capstone

Student Site for Individual and Collaborative Activites

Team 15 – GateMate

Team Members: Jackson Bullard | Nathaniel Fredricks | Jose Martinez | Carissa Patton | Ivris Raymond

Project Summary:

The use of alternate wetting and drying (AWD) is gaining popularity among rice farmers in Arkansas as a way to reduce water usage without sacrificing crop yield. Doing this effectively requires frequent adjustment of levee gates, and timely accuracy is necessary in order to avoid diminished crop growth. This is difficult to achieve with traditional gates, where workers must manually adjust each gate, a process that is both time consuming and prone to human error. Gates remotely controlled by a stakeholder through software such as a mobile app would provide an effective solution to this problem.

The GateMate software will be developed to utilize and interface with an existing GateMate device prototype, along with the sensor array present on the prototype and any necessary field tracking technologies. The GateMate software application will not only allow rice farmers to raise and lower gates in the field remotely, but it will also factor in weather conditions to automatically adjust the gate levels to conserve the most water as well as assisting with optimal initial placements of the gates.

The architecture of the GateMate application will consist of four separate pieces of software: the mobile application that the users interface with, the central server and database, raspberry pi for disseminating server commands to the gates, and the gate software that will run on each gate’s control circuit. The mobile application will be implemented using Flutter, which is Google’s open-source framework for multi-platform applications from a single codebase [12]. A database will be used to store the necessary geographical and weather data needed for optimal gate placement as well as locations of fields and gates. The third piece of software will network the gates using the ESP8266 Wi-Fi Mesh API, allowing the user to issue commands to individual gates or groups of gates through the Flutter Application. Finally, in order to enable remote commands to be forwarded to the gate network, it will be necessary to create an intermediary module in the network capable of connecting to the cloud back-end and the gate network. 

The significance of an application like this involves resolving many issues faced by rice farmers today, including aiding in water conservation. Being able to remotely control gates will help farmers reduce excess water consumption, allowing farmers to save money and use optimal water levels to maximize crop yield. Additionally, one with less irrigation experience would be able to use the GateMate software to identify the most advantageous gate placements on a given topography as well as automate the process of modifying gate heights to regulate water levels on the field.

Code 

• GateMate GitHub Repository
• GateMate Code and Documentation

Reports and Presentations

• Final Report Spring 2023
• Final Presentation Spring 2023
• Preliminary Report Spring 2023
• Preliminary Presentation Spring 2023
• Final Proposal Report Fall 2022
• Final Proposal Presentation Fall 2022
• Preliminary Proposal Report Fall 2022
• Preliminary Proposal Presentation Fall 2022 

Logitistical Details

• Meeting Minutes and Attendance
• Tasks and Status

* The tasks denoted with “Awaiting MEEG” are tasks that were not able to be completed by the time this website was created due to time constraints with the MEEG team’s integration testing.