My mom loves plants. Everywhere she goes she finds a way of making a garden out of thin air. So I should not have been surprised when a small forest appeared in my apartment as the weeks she stayed with me went by during the year. She has now left. I know she would feel disappointed if she did not find her plants next time she comes to pay me a visit, so in the meantime, I am an involuntary gardener. So, it is “automating boring tasks with Arduino time”.
In this short post, I will share how I made a watering system for my mom’s plants with Arduino, and how you can make one too.
Hardware and assembly
For watering my plants with Arduino I started by gathering the necessary pieces. The project pieces are pretty straightforward. The Arduino is the brains of the project. In order to keep time, I am using a DS3231 real-time module. This way I can water the plants every day at the same time. To control water flow I am using a simple solenoid valve. To activate the solenoid valve I made an improvised relay module with a relay I had laying around. For debugging purposes, I added an LCD screen that states both the current time and valve activation time. The project was powered up by an old phone charger. The whole thing was embedded into a robust plastic box with an appropriate cutout for the display.
Programimng the Arduino
The developed code is down below. Again, it is pretty straightforward. I just had some problems because both the screen and the DS3231 modules use I2C to communicate with the Arduino and some libraries were just not working well together. Thankfully, this LCD library and this RTC library worked fine.
Final result
Finally, after some common problems with faulty wiring and bugs in the code, everything was working fine. You can see the assembly process and the final system working in the video next. If you like Arduino projects, maybe you will like my other stuff like this Terminator sunnies or this XBOX controller hack.
