How to Make Gardening Robot

We are naturally attracted to the beauty of greenery, mountains, fjord, and farms. But what if you don't have an automatic sprinkler for the grass and flowers at your backyard? What if you decided to start a new school and didn't have time to construct automatic sprinkler for all plants and garden across campus?

Today we will create a Remote Controlled Robot that will allow you to water your plants with the push of a button.

We need several 3D Printed and Laser Cut Parts which you can grab from my GitHub. Several components that need to be purchased externally is listed below.

1. Motor Driver (L293D)
2. HC-05 Bluetooth Module
3. Arduino
4. An old smartphone
5. 12V Water Pump
6. TIP31 Transistor
7. 2x Blue LED
8. 2x Wheel and Motor
9. 3x Lithium Ion Battery
10. Protein Jar

Now go ahead and 3D Print and Laser Cut all the parts that we will need. All the 3D Printed parts can be squeezed into one print job on the Dremel 3D45. It took about 12 hours to print.

For the laser cut pieces, rather than using acrylic sheets like my previous projects, I use a combination of wood and cardboard to cut down on weight. Plus I don't have acrylic sheets that is that large anyways.

So the different pieces of wood and cardboard will be joint together using hot glue and 3D Printed corner piece. Ensure you have enough hot glue for the job, also make sure not to glue the 3D printed right front piece too high or it will interfere with the smartphone holder.

Here comes the arduino, motor drivers, dc motors, bluetooth modules and all that fun stuff!

The DC Motors can be mounted to the bottom platform using the 3D Printed holders. Next, make the robot's eye using 2 blue LEDs and hot glue as diffusers. You can follow the schematics above to create the circuit.

We'll use a large protein jar as our water tank, we'll also use the 12v pump and a polytube to extend the output up to the top, this pump will be controlled using the TIP31 transistor.

The Arduino firmware is available on my GitHub, the Python desktop app is also up there. If you're using different pin configurations, be sure to make changes to the pin variables in the source code.

You can also control the robot via an app called Bluetooth RC Controller.

To set up the wireless webcam, I'm using my old smartphone and using the app IP Webcam which is highly simplistic.

Now that you have a remote controlled gardening robot, you can sit back relax and enjoy having fun with your robot. Useful for any lazy people who wouldn't want to lift a finger. Well, you still need to control the robot using your finger so don't be that lazy.