Category: DIY

Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

Plant watering

The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people’s preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful job caring for my plant!

website: http://www.takecareofmyplant.com

subreddit w/ voting: http://old.reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant (also has a lot of info if you want to do it yourself)

Similar project:

Raspberry pi is automatically uploading video of each watering to YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtl442fLi6KAOowkw_w83rA/vid…) and informing me with summary (incl. watering duration, soil moisture level, temperature, humidity, light level etc.).

I’m using a cheap submersible water pump controlled via relay by a python script running on raspberry pi. Water pump is connected to a clear vinyl tube for water distribution to the plant.

Availability of water level at source is checked by a non-contact liquid level sensor.

Triggers for watering plant are defined as follows: 1. There is water in tank / source (checked by non-contact liquid level sensor) 2. Soil moisture level is below certain threshold (measured by 2 soil moisture capacity sensors embedded in the plant) 3. Watering duration is determined by current soil moisture level; Python script activates relay to run the pump for the right duration. 4. Same python script also: – activates camera to record watering (+2s buffer to have all on the video) via usb cam connected to the pi (leveraging opencv lib) – uploads recorded video automatically to youtube channel (if pi has internet connection) – summarizes watering event and sends me notification with link to the recording and other helpful stats (temp, humidity, moisture level etc.) – saves all metrics to sqllite db for future reference

Key parts I ended up using for the project: 1. Water pump: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LWXV7DE/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b…

2. Non-contact Liquid Level Sensor -XKC-Y25-NPN: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D3246BH/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b…

3. Gikfun Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07H3P1NRM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b…

4. Relay: https://www.amazon.com/KeeYees-Channel-Indicator-Arduino-Ras… (though I just bought my when visiting Fry’s)