Automated Solar-Driven Ecosystem Design: From Biotopes to Life Support Systems

A hands-on university-level syllabus and laboratory handbook for teaching systems engineering through a low-cost solar- and grid-assisted water-loop testbed. The design and operation of small biological and electromechanical ecosystems has relevance to environmental monitoring, aquaria, hydroponics, resilient infrastructure, remote installations and constrained-habitat research. This syllabus uses the F2–F3 Space-Fountain testbed as a longitudinal case study for examining how energy, equipment, automation, maintenance, data quality and human intervention interact in practice. Rather than presenting the system as fully autonomous or space-ready, the course treats it as a human-in-the-loop terrestrial analogue whose value lies in its observable failures, reconfigurations and recovery strategies. Across fifteen modules, students progress from systems boundaries and requirements to device inventory, topology reconstruction, electrical and solar-energy fundamentals, metrology, operational logging, configuration management, automation, failure analysis, maintenance logistics, experimental design, autonomy assessment, SysOps data architecture and constrained-habitat translation. The syllabus includes scientific diagrams, worked calculations, evidence-classification rules, component-specific assessment rubrics, safety guidance, an observed-configuration-version history and a reproducibility framework supported by anonymised teaching data, a data dictionary and reusable templates. By the end of the course, students should be able to: define and justify system boundaries and requirements; distinguish power, energy and vendor-indicated state-of-charge values; reconstruct and version an evolving technical topology; normalise heterogeneous operational records without inventing precision; evaluate autonomy claims net of grid support and human intervention; analyse incidents using root-cause and FMEA methods; design maintenance and spare-parts strategies; propose controlled experiments and reproducible operational protocols; separate transferable systems principles from hardware assumptions that would require dedicated validation before application in space or other constrained habitats. The document does not claim flight qualification, orbital deployment readiness, complete solar independence or equivalence to a spacecraft life-support system. Its contribution is a rigorous and affordable teaching framework for studying autonomy, resilience, observability and evidence-based systems operations.