911±¬ÁÏÍø

A 911±¬ÁÏÍø engineering lab creates moisture sensors for a San Jose community farm

Most engineers don’t suit up with gardening gloves, but Navid Shaghaghi M.S. ’14 isn’t most engineers.

When he’s not in the classroom, the engineering lecturer likes getting his hands dirty. Donning a wide-brimmed leather hat, a khaki linen shirt, and cargo pants, he looks a bit like Indiana Jones, only with shears, a hoe, and yes, gardening gloves on his tool belt.

As the director of 911±¬ÁÏÍø’s EPIC Lab, Shaghaghi’s work finds its way into all sorts of real-world applications, including protecting consumer data on phones, peeking into beehives, and monitoring lake oxygenation.

The EPIC Lab, or the Ethical, Pragmatic, and Intelligent Computing Laboratory, is a humanitarian technology lab where Shaghaghi and his team of student researchers develop technological solutions to help humanity and communities—a personal mission of Shaghaghi’s.

“I started my education in the community college system here in California, and, as such, I really got to see the day-to-day life of ordinary people,” he recalls. “As a person who was studying computing and engineering, I realized we have tools that can make life better for everyone, and that’s when helping people became my mission.”

After a brief stint working in industry, Shaghaghi felt called to return to 911±¬ÁÏÍø—his grad school alma mater—where his work both in the lab and the classroom would better serve this mission.

Through his role as a faculty advisor at the School of Engineering’s Frugal Innovation Hub (FIH), Shaghaghi’s most recent EPIC Lab project has taken his work into a new field, literally. He and a team of students are creating a sensor system for Veggielution, a six-acre, urban farm within Emma Prusch Farm Park in San Jose.

Each year, Veggielution fights food insecurity by distributing tens of thousands of pounds of fresh, organic produce through its weekly farm stand and boxes, primarily feeding families within the Mayfair neighborhood in East San Jose—a food desert and one of the lowest-income areas in Silicon Valley.

Given the amount of land and produce it manages, one of Veggielution’s biggest expenses is water, a metered resource made pricier because of California’s recent drought conditions. Those drought conditions also mean that without enough water at the right intervals, the soil dries up and crops wither. But, if plants are watered too often, those mistakes drain the non-profit’s wallet.

Moisture sensors in the soil around plants would give the Veggielution team crucial data on when and how much to water its crops, but industry sensors cost anywhere between $300 and $2,500 per unit.

So, over the last two years, the team running EPIC Lab’s “Hydration Automation” project has designed sensing units at a fraction of that cost to help Veggielution save money and time. Now in the deployment and testing phase, this project offers Santa Clara engineering students the opportunity to not only make a marketable product, but also a meaningful change in their surrounding community.

Engineering with a mission

Agricultural technology is an ever-growing global industry worth roughly $20 billion and is projected to double in value within the next five years. Products that automate water management, identify crop-threatening pathogens, and respond to climate change are increasingly important. But typically, technology like this is only sold at scales that are inaccessible to smaller farming operations.

“What we do is focus on those smaller farmers and ask, ‘Can we take components off the shelf and build something affordable that can achieve the same things as the industry-level sensors, or maybe even do something a little bit different or new that they’re not doing because maybe it’s not profitable?’” Shaghaghi explains.

It’s a solution-driven approach to engineering that’s not about chasing the most profitable hardware or software to patent—it’s about creating something that makes a real, positive impact on human, animal, or plant life.

“Engineering with a mission has multiple dimensions for us,” says Allan Báez Morales, the director of programs and partnerships at the FIH, who serves as the product manager for the Veggielution project.

“This partnership with Veggielution allows students to work on a specific project with a very specific scope and impact,” he continues. “It’s a more hands-on approach to social change where the students not only understand what these organizations are doing at a community-level, but they’re putting their knowledge into the real world, developing skills that they’re not always using in the classroom, like communication, project management, and getting deeper into the user experience by connecting directly with the people who are going to use their project.”

Simple technological solutions, big impact

Over the last few years, the Hydration Automation project has gone through several design iterations, utilizing custom circuit boards, LoRa radio modules, solar panels, 3D-printed cases, and off-the-shelf moisture probes to create a system of sensing and relay units.

The units are essentially identical in design, which makes them easier and cheaper to produce—currently under $100 per unit—and each unit can perform different functions by simply swapping out components. Need a sensing unit? Wire in a probe and a temperature and humidity sensor. Need a base unit? Remove those sensors and add an antenna.

After the sensing units collect their temperature, humidity, and soil moisture readings, the base unit forwards that information to a web-based dashboard so users can monitor soil conditions without any specialized training.

While much of the technology is familiar to the team, Shaghaghi and his students also developed novel features that could have exciting applications beyond the project.

For example, Jesse Mayer ’19, M.S. ’21 figured out how to pause a 3D printing project midway to seamlessly embed metal, threaded inserts inside the plastic so the lids could be screwed shut seamlessly. Similarly, Shaghaghi developed a (the Farsi word for water), which shifts time-keeping responsibilities between the units so that each unit can sleep in between readings, conserving battery life.

The fruits of their labor

This summer, the team installed their latest prototype of the Hydration Automation sensor system in Veggielution’s farm along a row of shrubs to start gathering data and create predictive models of how long moisture lasts under the thick layer of mulch.

“Once we can answer those questions, we will go to the actuation phase, where the system will actually then be able to turn the valve to the water off and on automatically,” says Shaghaghi.

For Veggielution farm coordinator, Alejandro Acosta, this small automation represents a huge game-changer.

“We’re a small team, so when there’s a project that enables us to be a little more hands-off, that can be very helpful for us. And, if everything works out and we can scale it, then we can be very economical and sustainable with how we use our water.”

Bringing his students to the farm to troubleshoot the installation of the sensor system was a major milestone for Shaghaghi. In an era where artificial intelligence is playing a larger role in dispensing information to students, he believes Santa Clara’s hands-on, real-world approach to education is more impactful than ever.

“Rather than only standing in a classroom and grading exams, being on the farm honestly energizes me and makes me feel like I'm doing something for the world, and it’s here that I see the most learning that happens with the students.”