UrbanGardner
Well-Known Member
I thought I would share with the group a little project I have had bouncing around in my head for a while and finally decided to build. It is an automated watering system for my tent. I will try not to make this too boring for the non-geeks out there. I started out thinking about using a Raspberry Pi. But upto very recently the availability has been scarce. I experimented with the esp32 based microcontrollers but found them buggy with intense wifi usage. So I settled on the Raspberry PicoW. It has a powerful RP2040 CPU and builtin WIFI and plenty of IO. My number one requirement is to be able to control and monitor my stuff from anywhere. I travel often and hate to neglect my plants. I found a company based in NY. Adafruit Industries that specializes in selling hobby electronics. Sensors, microcontrollers and such. It turns out they also have a cloud based IoT gateway as well as provide much of the software running these gizmos. Check them out for sure!
The Electronics consist of a PicoW running all my code in CircuitPython as well as communicating to the internet. I have a MOSFET driver module controlling a 12v water valve to control water flow. The water flows through a flow meter and provides feed back in how much water I am dispensing. It was very easy to calibrate for accuracy. Right now I am using these 5" sprinkler heads. I have all my sprinklers connected with a series of 1/4" tubing and tees. I am not using any pumps. The water is connected directly to my main supply.
So my workflow is to open my dashboard in the cloud. Select how much water I want to use and turn it on. The system will shut down when the dispensed amount is reached. I find that the flow to the pots is slow and the water soaks in evenly. I currently have 5 plants in 3gal pots. 4 gallons will have a moderate runoff for each plant. I have been dispensing 3 gals and the pots are fully soaked just starting to drip.
Another of my requirements was to be able to log errors and the amount of water dispensed. I set up a webhook server on a Raspberry Pi that collects data from my PicoW (and other controllers) and uploads logs to Grafana Cloud. I built a dashboard that plots the history of my watering sessions and logs.
That is it for now. I would love to hear what others are doing. If anyone wants more details I would love to share.
The Electronics consist of a PicoW running all my code in CircuitPython as well as communicating to the internet. I have a MOSFET driver module controlling a 12v water valve to control water flow. The water flows through a flow meter and provides feed back in how much water I am dispensing. It was very easy to calibrate for accuracy. Right now I am using these 5" sprinkler heads. I have all my sprinklers connected with a series of 1/4" tubing and tees. I am not using any pumps. The water is connected directly to my main supply.
So my workflow is to open my dashboard in the cloud. Select how much water I want to use and turn it on. The system will shut down when the dispensed amount is reached. I find that the flow to the pots is slow and the water soaks in evenly. I currently have 5 plants in 3gal pots. 4 gallons will have a moderate runoff for each plant. I have been dispensing 3 gals and the pots are fully soaked just starting to drip.
Another of my requirements was to be able to log errors and the amount of water dispensed. I set up a webhook server on a Raspberry Pi that collects data from my PicoW (and other controllers) and uploads logs to Grafana Cloud. I built a dashboard that plots the history of my watering sessions and logs.
That is it for now. I would love to hear what others are doing. If anyone wants more details I would love to share.
