Love your plants

IN PROGRESS: Working, but not primetime

An automation project using Arduino to water house plants. This project is a simple "starter" project to show how to wire up and program an automated plant waterer.

Functionality

• Monitoring
  • Soil moisture checking
  • If soil is dry then turn on pump to water
  • If not then sleep for 4 hours
• Watering
  • Minimal watering (avoid over watering)
  • Pump water for ~3 seconds then wait ~3 seconds to allow absorption into soil
  • Recheck (monitor) then repeat
• Testing
  • Check how much water is pumped in dry to moist cycle
  • Test how long do plants go without watering between cycles
  • Evaluate size of container to allow watering for a month
• Extensions
  • Wireless Connections
  • Data logging
  • Measure air temperature
  • Measure water levels
  • Alerting on high air temperature
  • Alerting on low water levels

Current state of project

• Fully functioning, but with issues
• No clear component manifest
• Better diagram required
• Long-term testing

Build steps

Here

Components

NOTE: Many of these components were procured in China, they may not be easily available in other countries.

• Arduino board: UNO
• Moisture sensor:
• Relay:
• Water pump: 5v DC, ideally an immersion solar pump unit

Wiring

Libraries

All libraries are included in the lib dir in the project.

Using the following: (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

• elapsedMillis