Last spring I bought a little greenhouse, mainly to plant and grow my culinary herbs, such as basil, coriandre, thyme and others. The drawing in the picture shows as my child Matteo sees it.
In spite I take care of them sometimes it’s become more difficult when I go away for a few days. Especially in summer when one day without water could be tragic if I don’t want them to wilt!
For that I decided to build a system which will automatically water when I’m not there!
The project can be splitted in two independent modules.
The first one with weather indicator (WI) features. The second one supplies water (WS). The first and second one will cooperate to do a good job. My basil no longer will suffer the pain of hells!
The WI will produce output data. For example, these data could be sent to external forecast networks systems or queried.
Concerning WS, it will take a decision to water, or not, depending on weather indicator values.
The electronic system will be based on an Arduino board.
I decided to start developing the water supplier.
A minimalist system is composed as follow:
- Water tank
- Electric pump
- Power supply
- Pipe to serve water near the plants
- Start/Stop button
Now, it’s time to replace the start/stop button with a relay and we will trigger it using an Arduino pin out.