Planet Monitoring Using Sensors - Senior Design Project

[Guest qmellis]

Hello all,

I'm an EE student working on my senior project, but my group and I are still in the design stage.  We're designing a planet monitoring system that measures moisture, sunlight, temperature, and pH, cataloging this information in a database, and providing an interface that allows users to easily use this info to improve their gardening techniques.

We have a few questions that we've developed to help us pare down our vision, and I'd be really grateful if any of you could answer some or all of them.  Feel free just to address whichever question strikes your fancy.  (Hopefully, there is a question that does.)

Thank you all very much.


Engineering Questions
How will we deal with the effects of temperature on the pH measurement?
What are some ways to provide waterproofing to the device?
What are acceptable margins of error for our sensor measurements?
What government licenses or regulations should be consulted?
What interface would be best in providing the customer with data?
Will we provide simultaneous measurements or provide them one by one through a switching mechanism?