Hello Everyone I wanted to share a personal product design I have been working on and hopefully get some feed back/ advise so I can make this project happen. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me, its greatly appreciated.
THE IDEA behind the project is to promote growing in your home/ apartment. I want to make it easy for busy people who often live in small urban environments to be able to get into growing even if they do not have space, good natural light , or much time.
THE DESIGN utilizes unused over head space / over furniture space by using a retractable reel hanger that can lock at any height and unlocked and lowered just by lifting the planter a little. The planter is made from terracotta and is inspired by traditional Olla's which are porous terracotta pots that would be burring next to your plants in arid environments. The pot would be filled with water and would slowly wick the water through the terracotta to the soil and roots. It helped prevented run off and evaporation thus being more efficient usage of water in dry areas.
I WOULD LIKE to design a light board for it and have it manufactured. I have tried doing some research and figure things out myself but I feel a bit overwhelmed with all the options and how to designed it to be the most efficient and economical.
Its a small planter INTENDED FOR various house plants and herbs. I like the idea of it being able to grow some cheery tomatoes or possibly an auto flower but understand that size would mean you would need to use a bonsai or SCROG grow technique. So I want lighting with a color spectrum that will be the most versatile, and a potentiometer to control the intensity of the light.
THE PCB should be a half ring shape and have maybe 40 or so Samsung lm561 c led's not sure how to best wire them. The half ring pcb would connect to another making a full ring for the planter. So each planter would have a total of about 80 lm561c led's. I would like multiple planters to be able to be hooked together daisy chain if possible up to 5. I will up load rendering and photos of the design and how I imagine the PCB would look like. Hopefully this makes sense I especially need help with how to wire everything together so that the planters can be daisy chained together and the driver works as more units are added. Or maybe its best to have a built in driver for each planter. I would like each planter to have its own POT.
Thank you so much for any help/ suggestions you can give me. Also if anyone can recommend where I could get the boards manufactured.
I have attached a few photos to help better communicate the idea.
Cheers
Evan Powell
