Arduino Garden Controller – Automatic Watering and Data Logging
Arduino Garden Controller – Automatic Watering and Data Logging
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.
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Who else smiled to themselves and went "Oh, yeah" when he said ".. the gratification that comes from combining a working circuit and a working program is a little bit addictive"?
OMG 1 second into the video and i’m having a heart attack over your cutting technique. you’re gonna chop a finger off dude!
Please sup thai
Make more videos like this 👍👍
that cat jokes hits differently….
How u made graphs with arduino?
the cat is boss… he is looking for him.
I’ve watched tons of your more recent video and now I stubbled across this one. You have a lot of skills, woodworking, programming, gardening, engineering. Thanks for the video!
TBH it’s very impressive you got it working with a cheapo soldering iron
Coz trust me I have tried
I somehow missed the disclaimer about moisture sensors. It was said, you get what you paid for, fair enough.
But if you use the real cheap electrode resistive sensors, not only does your sensor destroy itself in use, it might poisen you in the process. As copper or worse even lead (from solder) salts are highly toxic in miniscual quantities.
But the capacitive ones are fine, I think. You can watch about that topic on Andreas Spiess channel, he explained it very well.
So either just take your time in the garden (it can be a very relaxing pasttime for stressed ppl afterall) or buy the “real“ stuff (or alternatively just buy your groceries, I suppose).
Nice Project
Practical Engineering. For potted plants you can also check out our new developed plant sensor which also integrates plant irrigation: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/husplus/hus-flower
Wow. I would like you to keep going …very nice
we love graphs, we should marry them… oh wait
Awesome dog
howd you generate the graph
HAHAh I like you.
Love the accurate sarcasm on human nature.
wow, I’ve been thinking of doing this in my backyard for the past 2 days and then boom this pops up on my youtube feed.
Hi there, I really like how thought through your design is- good work. Would you be interested in designing an automation unit for my Aquaponics set up?
Please message me on beatskizo@gmail.com or send me your contact info.
Thanks.
Why aren’t you nearly this entertaining anymore?
Hilarious commentary
Hi dude, the link on the github it’s in not found
has someone already noted that the data collection shield (without a battery – shown at ~ 2:27) looks like a cat? we have 4 cats, so i may just see them everywhere.
one is obviously on my lap right now.
I would love to see a follow up. Are you still growing plants? Have you learned anything? Have you made any improvements?
Neeto
I would love to have one of these. I also typically forget to water my small garden and everything dies. This sounds like a product that you could sell on Amazon or somewhere similar.
Hey,man..I wanna make this project.But I wanna make it so that it can water multiple plants in different vases whenever a vase needs water..How do I go about doing that?Can you help?Thanks in advance.
you need communication modules because cable always cause problems
One question , How many sensors moisture soil should I use in my crop ?
Liked for the Goodest boy.
0:43 may i ask what is DHTZZ?
I’ve studied irrigation science and this is very similar to how real crop irrigation works, although real irrigation is less automated. Crop evapotranspiration (which is the water consumed and released by the crop) is modelled to predict the rate of water consumption and irrigation frequency required to prevent crop damage. The bigger a crop grows, the more water is consumed in the root zone. One of the major factors influencing crop yield is actually the irrigation application uniformity, which is why sprinkler spray patterns and distribution methods are so highly researched. It’s an interesting topic.
Mantappu Ganu… I Like this tutorial…
Thank for your time n your cat🐈
U must keep it simple for folks that ain’t as engineer-ic as your talents, thx again 🤜🤛☮
sweet
now with marihuana
I too like sensors and graphs. Got one measuring the temperature of my refrigerator and it’s awesome.
Put the Arduino on your network and run a daemon on one of your computers. No SD card required.
"Wife’s make-up casing" and "pallet boards and a Pinterest account" 😄
This video was more than just eye opening but very funny. Loved it, thanks even if its 5 years later, still relevant.
goodwork man
I have thought about doing pretty much exactly this, just haven’t got a garden yet, or ever used an arduino. That’ll be fun someday
My man. Sharpen your kitchen knives. Please.
1:09: I love that cute cat.
What happened if water in tank is empty?? Then ur water pump may burn in dry run conditions… You should embedd two project in a single project.. I. E.
Smart irrigation system with automatic water level control using ultrasonic sensor.. So it gives sustainable solutions zero maintenance…
"https://github.com/gradyh/GradyHillhouse" please reload the link! D: this video are awesome! I need to build one for my self (srry my english is bad, im from Mexico!)
The Vegetronix sensor looks pretty solid but they are also a bit on the expensive side. If you don’t mind doing the encapsulation yourself then TLC555 based capacitive soil sensors work well with Arduino’s ADC, and even more so if you spend another buck to monitor them with an ADS1115.
https://thecavepearlproject.org/2020/10/27/hacking-a-capacitive-soil-moisture-sensor-for-frequency-output/
Came for the engineering, stayed for the humour 🙂
As someone into Biology. Plants also need iron and nitrates, just saying 😀
Not happy until it’s over complicated …… me too!