IoT Garden With Arduino
Hello makers!
This is a project to create your IoT garden!
You will be able to read the temperature of the room, control the pump and monitor your plants from your smartphone even when you are not at home.
In my setup, the pump takes the water from the tank to the distribution cylinder where it naturally flows to the plants.
Supplies
- Arduino board
- ESP8266
- Smartphone with Blynk app
- Dallas 18B20+ temperature sensor or similar
- Arduino IDE
- Some wires
- Prototyping PCB board
- Relay Arduino compatible
- Soldering kit
- Silicon hoses
- Small water pump
- Empty bottles or any liquid container
Make the Board
Here is a little schematic on how to put together the components.
The circuit is pretty simple, just check the datasheet for the temperature sensor you want to use.
The ESP8266 communicates with Arduino through serial, so you only neet 2 wires, RX and TX.
The relay needs only one signal pin. To connect the pump, cut the positive (or live if you use mains) wire and connect it to COM pin and NO (normally open) pin of the relay.
This will switch the pump ON when the relay receives the signal from Arduino.
Coding
It is pretty easy to put together a Blynk App and there are a lot of great tutorials on it, so I will not cover this part right now.
The Arduino code is directly related to what you put in the App, have a look at my code as an example and modify it with the variables you need....it will all make sense as soon as you start making the Blynk App!
It is very easy to implement automatic functions like moisture sensors to check the soil automatically, they are very cheap and you only need one wire to read the value.
I decided not to use them in this project because I didn't want a lot of wires running around my little plants :)
Downloads
Conclusion
I hope this will help you if you decide to take your garden to the next level....or if you simply want to go on holiday for a couple of weeks!
Starting from here, you have a solid base to build a very nice IoT garden, maybe with some LED screens and automatic functions!
Happy gardening!