Percolation Sensor Housing Finished

Above is an image of the housing we have designed for the Garden Consultant's sonar percolation sensor. Jason Franzenburg, a friend of our teacher Mr. Gallagher and Project Lead the Way teacher at West High School in Davenport, Iowa, was generous enough to print out the housing unit our team designed with his 3D printer. We thank his for his support of our project and for kindly printing this important part for our team on such short notice and on his last day of classes.

Thanks so much Mr. Franzenburg for your support and have a great summer!

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Meeting with Charles Mazza & Craig Cramer

This Wednesday we had the pleasure of meeting with Charles Mazza and Craig Cramer of Cornell University's College of Horticulture. Charles Mazza's work as author of "Site Assessment for Gardeners: a step-by-step workbook for better home landscapes and gardens" is the core of all gardening expertise behind the garden consultant so his approval of our automated techniques was vital to the validity of the Garden Consultant.

We could not be more happy with the outcome of our meeting where both Mazza and Cramer joined us in the excitement of our new invention and praised us for thinking outside the box and helping make their work more user friendly and simple to carry out.

It was also great to hear about the horticulture industry and listen to experts tell us more about home gardening and how our device could effect the industry and the hobby. As Charles Mazza said in our meeting, "Gardening is America's pastime... It's bigger than baseball!" We hope that the Garden Consultant will help people carry out their favorite hobby with ease like never before!

Thank your Mr. Mazza, Mr. Craig, and also Dr. Nina Bassuk (who was unable to attend the meeting but has helped us immensely thought out the year) for your help and your support of our InvenTeam! We had a blast meeting with you and are so thankful for the time you spent with us and the guidance you gave us at our meeting on Wednesday and through out our entire project.

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Relay for Life

As a part of our InvenTeam's initiative to pay it forward and give back to our community, we have decided to form our own Relay for Life team. Relay for Life is one of the American Cancer Society's biggest annual fundraisers, bringing communities together across the U.S. to honor cancer survivors, remember those who have been lost to cancer, and raise money and awareness for the fight against cancer. The Saratoga Relay will take place on June 6th and 7th.

For more information, or to help us meet our fundraising goal, please check out our Relay team's website. This page will keep you updated on our team's progress in the weeks leading up to Relay. We greatly appreciate any donations made to help us toward our team fundraising goal of $400.

Thanks!

Juliana

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Monday Night Meeting

Tonight, with help from Bruce Hodge, we created an Order of Operations diagram to go over all elements of the Garden Consultants inner workings. This diagrams serves as an outline for exactly what the Garden Consultant programming needs to do in order to function properly. We are using it to help tie together loose ends as we get closer to the completion of our project. We thought you might like to check out what were up to and get a better feel for what you will be able to do once the Garden Consultant is online.

Enjoy. - Elliott

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Coming to a Close

Hi Everyone -

Sorry it has been so long since our last post but we have been very busy as the school year and our grant period come to an end. It is so cool seeing everything come together and come to an end. AP exams are done on Thursday, final projects are being assigned in English, and Prom is on Saturday. Everyday it seems like there is a new Graduation Party invitation waiting for me on Facebook and it is just amazing to think that in just a few weeks we are done with high school. Everyone is finalizing their college plans (Congratulations on RPI Steve!) and signing up for housing and orientations. This could not be a more exciting part of our lives as we get ready for the awesome experiences and opportunities that await us and I haven't got started on what our InvenTeam is up to!

The past few Monday's we have been meeting with Bruce Hodge working to tie together our programs and get our system working perfectly before we release it to the public. Tonight we have another meeting and hopefully we will leave school with the whole system up and running or close to it. In addition to work on our programs we have also acquired a 2000 plant database from the USDA which makes the Garden Consultant even more useful and powerful as a gardening tool. Everything is going great and wrapping up well in terms of the Garden Consultant and we could not be more pleased. Soon I will be posting our preliminary version our teams Summary Report and we can't wait for you all to check it out.

In the next few weeks as we come to a close there will be tons of news and announcements as to what we are up to. Be sure to keep checking up on our progress. We can't wait to show you the Garden Consultant soon!

- Elliott

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