Arduino Garden Controller - Automatic Watering and Data Logging
Tips, Tricks
Gardening in the modern age means making things more complicated and arduous, with electrons, bits, and bytes. Behold: the garduino. My brother got me an arduino microcontroller board for Christmas, which to me was a solution looking for a problem. I finally found the problem: fresh herbs are expensive at the grocery store. But apparently not as expensive as adding a bunch of sensors and electronics to your garden. Build one yourself or just poke around in the code: https://github.com/gradyh/GradyHillhouseGarduino.git Thanks to my brother, Graham, for the Arduino board and editing the narration. Thanks to Chris from YouTube channel AvE (https://www.youtube.com/user/arduinoversusevil) for the tips on soil moisture sensors and water hammer. Most of the parts in this build came from http://www.adafruit.com. Combining microcontrollers and gardening is a really popular idea. I think that’s because gardens have very simple inputs and outputs that are easy to wrap your head around. I guess people (myself included) see a notoriously simple and relaxed hobby and can’t help but feel compelled to overcomplicate it. But just about anyone can connect the dots between "Garden needs water" and "I am not a responsible human being who is capable of remembering to water a garden every day" and realize, "Hey, I can use technology to overcome my personal shortcomings," and more than that, "I can bend technology to my will and that will feel good to my ego and my sense of self-worth." After all, no one’s hobby is to buy an irrigation controller off the shelf of a hardware store. Thanks for watching, and let me know what you think. A few technical details below... If there's anything I didn't address, feel free to shoot me a question in the comments. Moisture sensors that measure the resistance or conductivity across the soil matrix between two contacts are essentially junk. First of all, resistance is not a very good indicator of moisture content, because it is highly dependent on a number of factors which might vary from garden to garden including soil ph, dissolved solids in the water, and temperature. Second, most of them are of poor quality with contacts that easily corrode. For the most part you'd be lucky to get one to last through an entire season. Capacitive sensors are generally more accurate because they are just measuring the change in dialetric properties of the soil which is less sensitive to other environmental factors. They also don't require any exposed conductive surfaces which means they can last a bit longer in the harsh environment of your backyard. My soil moisture sensor (and soil temperature sensor) came from http://www.vegetronix.com. The arudino’s analog inputs read voltage, so to use a resistive sensor (like the photoresistor I used to measure sunlight), you have to set up a voltage divider. This is just a really simple circuit which divides the voltage drop between your sensor and a known resistor. You know the current is the same for both, so you can calculate the resistance of your sensor using ohm’s law. The only problem here is that a photoresistor’s relationship to illuminance is log-log, that is to say it spans several orders of magnitude. So if you use a big resistor (5k - 10k ohm) in your voltage divider, your sensor will be sensitive to low light levels, but you won’t be able to tell the difference between a sunny day and an overcast one. Since this thing’s going outside, I used a 100 ohm resistor, which should hopefully give me good differentiation between levels of brightness in the daylight. Music from incompotech.com
Comments
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WOW...SO COOLLL...I WILL DO ONE
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my lm35 doesn't work. the reading fluctuates so much. it works fine when its the only sensor connected to arduino. but as soon as i connect other sensors the problem starts.
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Cool! Have you tried to grow different herbs?
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Hi, I'm trying to make a treat dispenser for a client of mine of is a quadriplegic. I just got an Arduino Uno board Rev3 & Capacitive touch breakout board AT42 & Motorshield V2 kit I'm not sure of what basic steps I need to take to program the board to tell the servo motor to rotate 1/4 turn Can you give me some step by step instruction to wire and program the board or tell me what tutorial I should go to. BobsPetStop@gmail.com I'm a Beginner!!
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Hi,Amazing video.I have an electronics project and I wanted to ask if you have the data available.I have to analyse the data and I wanted to use your as reference.The deadline is really close and I Urgently require it.I would be highly grateful if you could help me.
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Ummmm.....The vegetronix.com website states that the probes are "ultra low price". How is $40 for ONE probe "ultra low price"?
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"As a cat owner it would be nice to have something do what I tell it to"
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How dare you psychoanalyze the tinkerer lifestyle at the end of the video. :p
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Is the analog response of a soil moisture sensor linear or logarithmic? I have a gas sensor that responds logarithmicly and I have no idea how to convert voltage to ppm, and neither does anyone on the internet when I google it
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I love your pets. also awesome job with the garden I'm hoping to get mine going soon
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if doggy pees by sensor how will you eleminte the error?
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Great vid man
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Came for the project, stayed for the graphs.
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This totally appeals to my love of making graphs, with the added bonus of fresh herbs. I love it.
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your dog is hella cute
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Nice mix of gardening, sarcasm and tech. Well done.
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Great video! I really like your honest and humble approach. Thanks!
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When you attach the solenoid to your water tap, do you leave the tap on the entire time? Im testing my solenoid right now and if the tap is already on when I try to open the valve it doesn't open. Is this why you use the water hammer arrestor? Thanks
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