As seen in most fall/winter months, plant production around the world is down due to lack of sunlight and temperature caused by the season. This also doesn’t address places that can never grow plants or food due to even harsh weather conditions year-round such as the Sahara Desert and Antarctica. We also would like to be able to grow the plants faster and have a larger crop yield than peak growing seasons. This is where the Sun Replacement Garden comes into play. For our business model, we created a LED driven greenhouse enclosure that can be self-sustaining by being able to water the plants on a timer and give the supplemental lighting by the structure in an act to imitate natural sunlight. To be able to have the self-sustaining enclosure we needed to have a control board that operated the five LED drivers which control the amount of artificial light intensity on the four LEDs boards that omit onto the plants. The boards also operated the 4 submerged water pumps that would water the plants daily on a programmed timer in our microcontroller’s software. These four water pumps are sent through our sprinkler type irrigation system to cover the maximum amount of ground for the plants. The state of the plants is monitored by our four soil moisture/temperature sensors which are placed precisely to accurately measure plant conditions so we can optimize the plant growing process. This data was then sent and stored to our online dashboard where we can monitor the conditions of the plants and turn down the intensity of the LED’s or even choose to only run certain kinds of wavelengths manually for certain growth cycles of the plants chosen. For our full development of our product, we calculated the total cost was $949.50 which can be reduced by approximately $200 because of errors in production of our first control boards and water pumps and in changing design processes of how we design the irrigation systems. Although the price may seem high for a startup starting at $650-700, we can deliver on the robustness and functionality of our product to create harvestable plants which can save you in the long term instead of having to ship in vegetables in these harsh environments previously discussed. The only cost to the consumer once installed would be power, water, and seeds for growing. For our future endeavors, we could continue with higher crop yield by introducing larger greenhouses with extra sensors to cover more area of the soil. We also proposed creating adjustable heights for the LED’s so the intensity of the lighting could be focused on shining directly onto the plants. This in turn would help having a successful harvest in a much faster time cycle. The control board is powered by a 5V 20 watt power supply and a 36V 1200 watt power supply which in hindsight could be replaced with a lower wattage power supply which helps in price reductions. With learning from our decisions made and not made, our company could create a self-sustaining greenhouse that could be much more efficient and affordable than most normal greenhouses in today's modern horticulture practices.

Video of Plants Being Watered: