Tag: plants

The Outdoor IoT Farm Begins

apead

It’s time to start moving the indoor IoT Farm to being an outdoor IoT farm. The idea I have is to do some experimentation and research into creating automated constrained space farms. I’m going to turn this into a hands on hack series for the CPTMSDUG user group and also share the learnings. Hopefully it goes well. 😁

Today was the big shopping day to get everything I need.

Shopping at the nursery with the much needed coffee.
Some nice wooden planters from the Pole Yard.
Preparing the soil
The offerzen Basil that was grown at a hack event was planted
Getting there
The first evening of the indoor crop being outdoors
New crops added to the indoor IoT Grow station

Arduino Smart Watering Kit with Azure IoT Central

apead

I came across this Smart Watering Kit by Elecrow. It was really great, but one thing missing is internet conectivity. We all know that we can’t grow plants without the “I” in IoT! So let’s see what we can do about that!

Electrow Ardunio Smart Plant Watering Kit
Inside the box

The kit comes with everything you need to water four different plants automatically.

The box contains

  • Arduino Leonardo
  • Power Supply
  • Pump
  • 4 Capacitive Moisture Sensors
  • 4 Way valves
  • Pipes

The kit is very comprensive and includes and LCD display which can show at a glance the conditions of your plants.

The board
Serial Port

The board unfortunately does not have built in wifi connectivity. But what it does have is a serial port. That’s perfect, so what we could do is use that to send telemetry out to another device that is internet / wifi enabled.

A good device for that is a good old (and cheap) 8266 board. I had a NodeMCU in my box of tricks, so I decided to use that.

Parts List

  • Arduino Smart Watering Board (Arduino Leonardo)
  • NodeMCU board
  • 2.2 K ohm resistor
  • 1 K ohm Resistor
  • 470 ohm Resistor
  • Breadboard
  • Wires
  • Power Supply

Connecting an Arduino Leonardo to a Node MCU via Serial Port

First step is to make it work on a breadboard.

Parts List

  • Arduino Smart Watering Board (Arduino Leonardo)
  • NodeMCU board
  • 2.2 K ohm resistor
  • 1 K ohm Resistor
  • 470 ohm Resistor
  • Veroboard
  • Wires
  • Power Supply
Connecting an Arduino Leonardo to a Node MCU via Serial Port

Once working, the next step is to build that onto a more permanent solution. I decided to use just veroboard as it was quick and easy.

Two boards up and running

IoT Central

Device Templates

Device Capabilities

Create device capabilities for the moisture sensors as telemetry (Moisture1, Moisture2, Moisture3, Moisture4). [Device Definition json file is in the github repository along with the source code]

Create properties for the 4 relay states for each of the 4 valves. [Device Definition json file is in the github repository along with the source code]

Create a property for the pump state. [Device Definition json file is in the github repository along with the source code]

Publish the template and create an instance of the template as a device.

Instance of a device template

Note the “connection” information for the new device instance.

Device “Connection” information

Take note of the following:

  • Scope ID
  • Device ID
  • Primary Key
iotcserialrelay.ino

Update the iotcserialrelay.ino file with the:

  • WIFI_SSID – The wifi hotspot ssid
  • WIFI_PASSWORD – The wifi hotspot password
  • SCOPE_ID – The Device Instance’s Scope Id
  • DEVICE_ID – The Device Instance’s Device Id
  • DEVICE_KEY 0 The Device Instance’s Key

Deploy iotcserialrelay.ino to NodeMCU.

Deploy watering_kit.ino to the Arduio Smart Watering Board.

Telemetry in IoT Central

Once deployed and connection is made, telemetry starts appearing within IoT Central’s dashboard.

Finished Product with happy plants powered by Microsoft Azure 😎😎

Source code: https://github.com/apead/SmartWateringKit

Product Information: https://www.elecrow.com/arduino-automatic-smart-plant-watering-kit.html

Where to buy? https://www.robotics.org.za/AAK90039K