BLUElab MEtro: Smart Water Irrigation System for Willow Run Acres

BLUElab Metro is a student organization at the University of Michigan that focuses on community-engaged design and engineering. We are partnered with Willow Run Acres (WRA), a community farm in Ypsilanti, MI to assist the local community through help on the farm and STEM education. Our technical project is a smart drip irrigation system for community farm run by the head of WRA, T.C Collins to optimize crop yield, reduce labor, and reduce water utility costs for the farm. Historically, T.C has hand watered the entire farm with a tank of water he filled up on the back of his truck.

As project manager and technical lead, I led and designed the project: building an end-to-end system that measures soil moisture in the field and recommends when and how much to irrigate. Battery-powered sensor nodes report over LoRa to a gateway and up to the cloud, and a backend fuses those readings with a Penman-Monteith reference-evapotranspiration model and a LightGBM forecaster, turning raw moisture data into irrigation guidance on a live dashboard.

The full stack is being deployed at WRA's ClayHill Farm: Heltec CubeCell nodes to a Feather M0 gateway to a Particle Boron, feeding a FastAPI and LightGBM backend with a web frontend. Surviving the field was its own engineering problem, solved with IP67 enclosures, Gore-Tex pressure vents, and adhesive heat-shrink against moisture ingress.