Brainstormed Ideas, Idea Evaluation, Improvements
At the start of our project, we set our sights low and focused on solving problems that POTS, an organization in the Bronx had. We worked at POTS as rising sophomores and noticed that while it is an effective organization, serving 250-300 people a day, it sometimes ran out of food, its food pantry shelves were unorganized, and it had an unused courtyard in the back, which could potentially, we reasoned, be very valuable. Our first idea was to build better shelves for POTS’s food pantry, with stronger but lighter materials and compartments for more organized storage. These shelves would also be slightly tilted to allow the food pantry customer to better see the food being sold.
Our second idea (2) was to make some sort of system where the guests entering the soup kitchen dining room would be counted by an Arduino. Once the Arduino had counted a certain number of guests, it would send an alert to the chef to either bring out more food or make more, so that all the guests could be served the same meal (often, the guests who did not get served the original food served would get a frozen dish, which made them irritable, and, often the unhappy guest left without eating).
Lastly, we wanted to use POTS’s outdoor courtyard to the fullest extent by combining a hat stand and upside-down tomato planters in such a way that multiple tomato planters would be hung on the hat stand-like object, saving POTS space while still growing a large amount of produce (3). Ideally, any vegetable could be grown in these planters, and the food grown would be used in the kitchen to feed the hungry people of the Bronx. The upside-down tomato hat stand would also rotate, giving the person operating it little trouble accessing both the plants in the back and front.
We decided the upside-down tomato hat stand was our best idea, and that it did not have to be limited to POTS itself. Any hungry family anywhere could use this device to feed their family in a healthy, compact way. Thus, we developed this idea further so that it would be even more efficient.
Our design now had a water tank at the bottom, so that the planter would not have to water the plants everyday. The hat stand part would function as a real plant’s stem would, bringing water up from the base into the rest of the plant, or, in this case, the hanging plant baskets.
Our design now had a water tank at the bottom, so that the planter would not have to water the plants everyday. The hat stand part would function as a real plant’s stem would, bringing water up from the base into the rest of the plant, or, in this case, the hanging plant baskets.
To do this, we imagined a dropper like (5), and made the top of the “stem” a suction pump, thinking that the planter could squeeze it to bring water from the tank up into the planters. The only other work the planter would have to do would be to fill the water tank every few days.
From here, we used the 3D design website Tinkercad to make prototypes of our design. After going through a few designs with 8 "arms", we came up with this 4-"armed" design that conserves space and gives each plant enough room to grow without being overshadowed by the others, as shown in (6). See more on the Our Design page.