These multiple people were professor and their students. The main value for that particular project wasn’t coconuts nor product development, it was education. In that light the project is awesome, pretty sure the students learned tons of valuable things about hardware design debugging and testing, embedded software, coconut farming, and many others.
From product development point of view, I think a team of 3-5 smart and experienced people is likely to deliver better result in a couple of months, given reasonable amount of funding to purchase commercially available components.
From product development point of view, I think a team of 3-5 smart and experienced people is likely to deliver better result in a couple of months, given reasonable amount of funding to purchase commercially available components.