Preamble:

This project was mainly done for participating in the US-China Green electronic Challenge. If you like our project, think it is interesting or just want to make our day, we appreciate a vote for this. Thanks and enjoy our project description :)

Introduction:

Nowadays lifestyle in China is characterized by a strong urbanization. People move from the countryside to the cities, live in small apartments. Although people actually want to live in the city, especially in European countries and in the US a strong counter movement of urbanization takes place. People start growing their own vegetables and fruits in small community gardens like the German Schrebergarten (British English: Allotment garden; Chinese: 社区农圃) are a common sight in western countries, and even public spaces, like parks, are used for this in a project called “Urban Farming”. People grow their own herbs at home to avoid the lower quality of mass products (e.g. in a window farm) and even make their own honey by domesticating bees on the balcony, the terrace or in garden. Some people even grow wine on their rooftops and process the juice with small scale equipment, people brew their own beer or burn their own liquor out of fruits, which is mostly legal if done for private use in small scale. Those activities can be clustered to “Urban Agriculture”. Those activities are mainly done as recreational activity or hobby, as political statement (against consumerism/capitalism and for sustainability) and out of food safety concerns and not out of monetary reasons.

Idea:

When we wanted to take part in this contest because of a class, our given target was to create a product within a short time scale (7 days) from 0 to the finished product and with a very limited budget. First we were browsing our homes for unused electronics, where we found a broken mobile phone, an unused air humidifier, and old (manual) thermometer/ hygrometer and an unused laptop cooling base. From those products we chose the air humidifier and got two different ideas for using it:

Combine the air humidifier with an electronic hygrometer and create an automated air humidifier with adjustable relative air humidity and building a greenhouse for plants that need a high relative air humidity. Since we didn’t have an electronic hygrometer, we chose the second idea. To emphasize on the green aspect, we combined it with the idea of “Urban agriculture” and “Home Farming” to use it as a greenhouse for growing mushrooms.

More information and sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_agriculture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowfarm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agricultu...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_beekeeping

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winery#Urban_winery

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environm...