By combining an Arduino with a soil moisture sensor, relay, and pump, you can automate plant watering. 🌱
When the sensor detects dryness, the pump activates and waters the plants automatically. 💧
This is relatively easy to build, even for beginners, and a great way to learn programming. It's also recommended as a foundation for IoT. ✨
#Arduino #IoT #PythonLearning #Automation #SoilMoistureSensor #WateringRobot 💡
All you'd like to know about correctly assess the moisture in your soil.
Do you use a water sensor for soil?
Are you playing with these sensors?
Get yourself educated!
#TDR, #FDR, #capacitance, #resistance: A comparison of common soil moisture sensing methods, their pros and cons, and their applications.
https://www.metergroup.com/en/meter-environment/measurement-insights/tdr-fdr-capacitance-compared
#soil #soilmoisture #soilmoisturesensor
#sensor #watersensor #moisturesensor
#lorawan #arduino #hobbyfarm
#metergroup
Soil Moisture Sensor Coating Lessons Learned The Hard Way
Ever wanted to measure soil moisture? Common "soil moisture meter module arduino raspberry compatible free shipping" PCBs might deceive you with their ascetic looks. Today, [Raphael (@rbaron_)] is here to teach us (Twitter, unrolled) what it takes to build a soil-embedded sensor that can actually survive contact with a plant.
As the picture might hint, waterproofing is of paramount importance, and soldermask doesn't quite cut it. Raphael describes his journey of figuring out approaches and coatings that would last, starting from simply using nail polish, and ending with the current option - a rotisserie-like device that rotates sensors as the coating applied to them dries, mitigating a certain kind of structural failure observed long-term. With plenty of illustrative pictures and even a video of the rotisserie device in action, you'll quickly learn things that took time and effort for Raphael to figure out.
This isn't the first time Raphael shares some design battlefield stories and lessons with us - he has taught us about overall capacitive moisture sensor principles, too! If that interests you, we've covered quite a few moisture sensor designs, from cheap but hardy two-nails designs to flip-dot-equipped ones, and some of us take the commercial designs and upgrade them!
We thank [Chaos] for sharing this with us!
When I started working on my soil moisture sensor, I had little idea about how harsh an environment the soil really is. In this , cool failure modes & solutions when sticking electronics in the ground: pic.twitter.com/ROGvLSPgk9
-- Raphael (@rbaron_) February 9, 2022
#greenhacks #automatedplantcare #capacitivesensor #gardening #moisturesensor #plantcare #plants #soilmoisturesensor #soilsensor #water
Automation allows you to leaf your plants alone
The greatest threat to a potted plant stems from its owner's forgetfulness, but [Sasa Karanovic] has created an automation system that will keep his plants from getting too thirsty. Over the past year [Sasa] has been documenting an elegant system for monitoring and watering plants which has now blossomed into a fully automated solution.
If you haven't seen the earlier stages of the project, they're definitely worth checking out. The short version is that [Sasa] has developed a watering system that uses I2C to communicate with soil moisture, temperature, and light sensors as well as to control solenoids that allow for individual plants to be watered as needed. An ESP32 serves as a bridge, allowing for the sensors to be read and the water to be dispensed via an HTTP interface.
In this final part, [Sasa] integrates his watering system into a home automation system. He uses a MySQL database to store logs of sensor data and watering activity, and n8n to automate measurement and watering. If something isn't quite right, the system will even send him a Telegram notification that something is amiss.
If you think automation might be the best way to save your plants from a slow death, [Sasa] has kindly shared his excellent work on GitHub. Even if you don't have a green thumb, this is still a great example of how to develop a home automation solution from scratch. If you're more interested in television than gardening, check out [Sasa]'s approach to replacing a remote control with a web interface!
#homehacks #automatedplantcare #automaticplantwatering #automation #esp32 #homeautomation #homeassistant #plants #soilmoisturesensor #temperaturesensor
Check Soil Moisture At A Glance With This Useful Display
Keeping soil moist is key to keeping most plants happy. It can be a pain having to dip one's fingers into dirty soil on the regular, so it's desirable to have a tool to do the job instead. [Andrew Lamchenko] built a capable soil moisture monitor, and equipped it with an E-ink display for easy readings at a glance.
The device is built around the NRF52810 or other related NRF52 microcontrollers, which run the show. Rather than using an off-the-shelf sensor to determine soil conditions, an LMC555CMX timer chip is used, a variant of the classic 555 timer designed for low power consumption. Combined with the right PCB design, this can act as a moisture sensor by detecting capacitance changes in the soil. The sensor is also able to send data using the MySensor protocol, allowing it to be used as a part of a home automation system.
The soil is tested periodically with the moisture sensor, and displayed on the attached e-ink screen. Since the e-ink display requires no electricity except when rewriting the display, this allows the sensor to operate for long periods without using a lot of battery power. The soil can be checked, the display updated, and then the entire system can be put to sleep, using tiny amounts of power until it's time to test the soil again.
It's a great example of design for low power applications, where component selection really is everything. We've featured [Andrew]'s projects before; he's long been a fan of using e-ink displays to create long-lasting, low power budget sensor platforms. Video after the break.
Solar Stevenson Screen for Smart Sprinkler
It's not infrequent that we see the combination of moisture sensors and water pumps to automate plant maintenance. Each one has a unique take on the idea, though, and solves problems in ways that could be useful for other applications as well. [Emiliano Valencia] approached the project with a few notable technologies worth gleaning, and did a nice writeup of his "Autonomous Solar Powered Irrigation Monitoring Station" (named Steve Waters as less of a mouthful).
Of particular interest was [Emiliano]'s solution for 3D printing a threaded rod; lay it flat and shave off the top and bottom. You didn't need the whole thread anyway, did you? Despite the relatively limited number of GPIO pins on the ESP8266, the station has three analog sensors via an ADS1115 ADC to I2C, a BME280 for temperature, pressure, and humidity (also on the I2C bus), and two MOSFETs for controlling valves. For power, a solar cell on top of the enclosure charges an 18650 cell. Communication over wireless goes to Thingspeak, where a nice dashboard displays everything you could want. The whole idea of the Stevenson Screen is clever as well, and while this one is 3D printed, it seems any kind of stacking container could be modified to serve the same purpose and achieve any size by stacking more units. We're skeptical about bugs getting in the electronics, though.
We recently saw an ESP32-based capacitive moisture sensor on a single PCB sending via MQTT, and we've seen [Emiliano] produce other high quality content etching PCBs with a vinyl cutter.
#greenhacks #hardware #automatedplantcare #capacitivesensor #esp8266 #homeautomation #moisturesensor #soilmoisturesensor #soilsensor
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