[asbshyam]

Originally Posted by chiro3110

Thank you Subbu for sharing the setup. It is very cool! I do have a lot of questions on it, so let me enumerate.

Hello chiro3110,

Thank you! You have an awesome setup and compared to what I have at home, your's is far more at an industrial scale

Regarding your queries,

1. The circuit is custom and inspired from multiple DIYs on the internet. It is also pretty basic as I don't have to drive too many items. Please let me know if you would like a circuit diagram, I'd be happy to try my hands at Paint.

2. The soil moisture sensor is a planned addition, it is not yet in the "production" setup. I plan to use it only on the water tank and use it's binary state rather than making a serial read-through system. I'm not planning to use any sensors on the pots due to a few reasons,
a. Too many wires from each pot, will need to figure out a way to read this feed of data.
b. As your uncle rightly pointed out, not all pots would dry at the same time, I could end up over-watering other pots as I have a single loop

Regarding seasonal changes, in Pune, it is pretty predictable. During the dry summer days, I set the crontab to water once additionally around sunrise and the second one close to my brushing schedule. Otherwise, it is always once close to my brushing schedule I take a look at the plants, check their health, infestations, etc and make changes to the schedule and duration. Duration would be adjusted so that the water doesn't overflow and the soil is moist enough.

3. I house the entire circuit on a recyclable cardboard box right under my router, been on a search for a suitable box that can house the setup. I run a standard gauge electrical wire from the setup to power the motor, the positive from the relay and negative to common ground. And that's fully submerged in the murky bisleri reservoir.

4. I use a old OnePlus 5V 2A USB Wall wart for the Pi, it does not do any electrical heavy-lifting. I use another 12V 2A DC wall charger (RS 100+ from any local electrical shops) to power the relay, LED (post resistance) and motor. The motor pumps based on the voltage and for sometime I powered it directly from the Pi's GPIO without any relays. But the Pi behaves erratically when loaded and so I opted to shift the electrical load away. At the end of the day, Pi is the most expensive part of this jig-saw.

5. None at the moment. However, almost an year ago, I did connect a buzzer scripted to play the Imperial March and the moisture sensor is tested. I plan to play the Imperial March every time the watering starts and add a small warning light when the moisture sensor is triggered (tank's empty). I was looking at some push notification system (Google Firebase, etc), but this is something that I have to learn from scratch. I'm still trying to find the drive and motivation to add this on.

There are several manual interventions that would be necessary over a couple of weeks and I would like for the setup to remain that way. This DIY was done only for the plants to survive the two week yearly vacation. Now, it's comfortably feeding my laziness, a virtual gardener to water my plants while I watch them brushing my teeth.

Best, Subbu

[chiro3110]

Originally Posted by asbshyam

Hello chiro3110,Thank you! You have an awesome setup and compared to what I have at home, your's is far more at an industrial scale ....There are several manual interventions that would be necessary over a couple of weeks and I would like for the setup to remain that way. This DIY was done only for the plants to survive the two week yearly vacation. Now, it's comfortably feeding my laziness, a virtual gardener to water my plants while I watch them brushing my teeth. Best, Subbu

Thanks Subbu. It starts with some purpose and finally turns to get us more lazy, . The circuit diagram will be great. May think something on that line for a smaller setup in other place. However, I would have loved to see your code too, but unfortunately as you mentioned it was done on Python, I'm quite illiterate at it. However, I'm pretty sure that the circuit diagram can be replicated on a Arduino with some C++ code, which is what I would try.

[psmenon]

Originally Posted by mallumowgli

Thank you for this thread. Set up is excellent

Your garden looks nice



Am looking at setting up a similar set up in my apartment balcony. Can you share more details and a photo? Thanks in advance

Apologize for the very delayed reply, please find a pic of the equipment attached with. This is sold in India by a friend of mine based out of Bangalore, it was worth the 3k I gave him.

Timer is basically a solenoid inside that controls the opening and closing of the valve, attached directly a pipe as you can see in the pic. The main pipe connects to about 200 plants.

[mohan41]

Hi @chiro3110, how are the smarteefi switches holding up? I am renovating my house. I am evaluating smart switches from smarteefi. Their product range looks very good. Hence wanted to know long term reliability of these switches.