Connected Hydroponic Plant Pot Using Internet of Things and a Website Made by Spring and Angular

In this Instructable I will show you my fifth electronic and IT project that I have made during my studies at the Moroccan School of Engineering Sciences (EMSI). As an IT engineer I learned on my own how to use the electronic components and how to program Arduino and ESP2866 with C language and also Raspberry Pi3 to control all those electronic components all in a plastic model that I designed and then cut with a laser cutter.

The main idea of this project is Designing a plant pot that provides the plant with what it needs in terms of water (using hydroponic technique), good environment and artificial lighting while having the ability to know what happen around the plant remotely in real time and continuously through a website made by Spring boot and Angular frameworks

Hydroponic gardening is currently considered a modern practice that achieves impressive results. Similarly, things become even more interesting if we combine it with information and communication technologies (ICT)

This culture is little used in Morocco and this is an opportunity to encourage Moroccan farmers and simple individuals to adopt this technique while associating ICT to achieve satisfactory results, and this is why I thought of carrying out this project.

In this project the client (simple private individual or farmer) has an empty land, not necessarily agricultural but it is important that it is ventilated and in contact with the sun's rays, and in which he wishes to install a connected hydroponic gardening system.

A hydroponic gardening system is a system that adopts the technique of off-ground production, which means that the roots of the cultivated plants are not drowned in their natural environment (the soil), but in a nutritious liquid. To make things more interesting, each plant is wrapped in a small house equipped with a few sensors that help monitor and ensure the plant's survival in real time and continuously.

This connected planting technique has the following advantages :

Reduced water consumption

Controlled and rapid plant growth

Continuous real-time remote monitoring of the system

The small house (duplex) is ideal to protect the plant as much as possible against attacks caused by a disease, an animal or use google an insect.

The customer does not need to have an agricultural field.

This technique of connected planting has the following disadvantages :

The amount of capital to be invested is high

There is a high consumption of electrical energy

My goal is thus to build this small house in which we put the plant. This little house contains the sensors that will capture the data, send them to the microcontroller (Raspberry Pi) that will then send them to the website to design called "hydroponicfarm_4.0.ma". This site will allow the user to order also electronic products for agricultural use and other actions.

1- Raspeberry Pi3 B: it is a very small computer with an ARM processor that allows the execution of several variants of the free GNU/Linux operating system, including Debian, and compatible software. This board has several models and i have used the Raspberry Pi 3 B model in this project to control the associated electronic components on the plant pot as well as to run the artificial intelligence program.

2- Esp8266 nodemcu : it is a microcontroller with a Wifi connection through which data can be sent and received remotely to Raspberry Pi3. i used this microcontroler to control the associated electronic components (Dht22 / Soil sensor / Led RGB)

3- Wires M/M F/F : Allow to conduct electricity to the desired location.

4- Resistor : are all of a value of 220ohm connected with some electronic components to prevent them from being burned.

5- Temperature sensor DHT22 : Senses the temperature degree that will be displayed automatically on the LCD display.

6- 5V Relay : to help the Raspberry Pi board to turn the mini water pumps on and off.

7- LM2596 DC-DC Module (Step Down) : it is an Adjustable Voltage Regulator Lowerer and thanks to which the Raspbery Pi board and the other components are powered from 19V.

8- mini water pump 12V : pump particularly suitable for the transfer of the liquid food industry like milk, edible oil, drinking water ... etc.

9- Adaptator 19V 3.4A : essential to power the entire electrical circuit of the plant pot

10- Led light bar : to generate artificial light for the plant. There are two colors of light: red and blue.

11- Camera Pi : camera module compatible with the Raspberry Pi with which you can take photos and videos. This camera is essential to analyze the current state of the plant with the help of the artificial intelligence program

12- ldr light sensor: it detects the degree of brightness outside the house. It is thanks to this component that the outdoor leds will turn on when it is dark and turn off when it is light

13- Mini fan 5V : to cool down the place in case of heat

Once all the electronic components are properly connected to the ESP board, a computer program must be downloaded to ensure proper communication of the system. To create any program, we must first download the programming tool by consulting the following link: www.www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software, then write the code in C or C++ language.

Here is the code source for who want to do the same

to realize the web application it would be necessary to program the backend and frontend part using the following technologies:

Backend : Spring Boot to follow microservice architecture, Mysql and MongoDB to manage the database and Eclipse as IDE

Frontend : Angular with visual code studio as IDE

For a good development process I used DeveOps techniques with the following tools: Git, Github, Jnekins, Docker and Kubernetes

Here is the link of the video for my simulation and more explanation in english simulation and explication

Here is the link of the video for my simulation and more explanation in french simulation and explication_french

Here is the link of the code project github code

Here is my email if anyone need my help or something : abouabdelmajidkhalil@gmail.com