My Robotic Garden

[yoeyyutch]

Hello all! I just registered on the site today. So I thought I'd introduce myself and my robotics project I am planning.

I'm a CAD student at Century College in Minnesota. In my Intro to Engineering class I built a simple simple robot using the BOE. It was quite fun and chellenging, and it really opened my eyes to the possibility of building my own robots to take care of simple daily tasks that I don't enjoy or have a hard time keeping up with.

So my first major project I want to tackle is to build a robotic vegetable garden. I LOVE eating vegetables out of my own garden. Unfortunately the deer and rodent community also LOVES my vegetables. It's pretty much warfare all season long.

In my opinion this presents a perfect opportunity to enlist the power of robotics to defend my garden from unwanted critters. Plus there are other simple tasks that such a robot could take care of such as monitoring soil condition and watering. 

A couple questions I have before I get started:

1) What type of microcontroller would work well?
2) What are some design considerations for making it able to withstand the outdoor elements?

Other than that any advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone!

[Th232]

Before looking at question 1, I'd expand on exactly what you want the robot to do.  Is it moving, is it stationary, list out all of the tasks you want it to do.

Regarding the garden defense part, if it's just turning on bright lights to scare away any animals, that'd be a relatively simple task.  If on the other hand you want it to physically chase the animals away, that'd be a whole other task.