Possibilities of an inexpensive, beginners MV1…
Last week I was at the national FFA (Future Farmers of America) convention in Indianapolis, hanging out with Peter and Drew in their MARSFarm booth. While wandering round the vendor hall, I stopped in at the Microsoft booth. As a way to get agricultural students using Excel and other prodects, they were pushing (giving away to teachers) a FarmBeats bag, which contained a BBC micro:bit, a small microprocessor that has a thermometer, light sensor, accelerometer and leds. You can program it in Python, Java or Microsoft’s MakeCode (a graphical, block programming system).
The idea is to collect data on a plant, then offload the data to Excel for some data graphing. Not too far off from MARSFarm’s collecting data and charting (though on a much smaller, restricted basis).
I am not a teacher, so I ordered one ($35) to play with. There is already example code to make a data logger for temperature and light. In a short time today I had it up and running and collecting data. Add a potted plant and a desk lamp and you can start charting your plant.
By itself, it is limited, you need another computer to download data and do graphing, and there is limited memory (256K) and processing, There are expansion boards for WiFi and adding your own I2C sensors, though that might be the point to switch over to a Raspberry Pi or something else.
If there is any interest, I can share more of my experience with it, and we can explore useful ideas and options.
Microsoft FarmBeats for Students
Microsoft’s MakeCode for micro:bits
Browser based MakeCode editor
Micro:Bit page