Automatic Indoor Garden - Waylay IO

Details

Maintaining the right environmental condition for our green ecosystem colleagues is crucial for their wellbeing. Maintaining adequate soil and air humidity levels, temperature, and light intensity not only boosts the growth rate of plants but also decreases disease pressure and plant stress.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to build our own minimalist automatic indoor garden. The system will be self-watering and it will log environment data which we’ll be able to visualize in a neat dashboard.

Alarms can be set up to let you know if certain thresholds are being overrun and the system cannot self-regulate. This being the case for temperature or light.

If you need help in deploying this solution or building something similar please contact Waylay.io for the low-code IoT Solution or Zalmotek.com for IoT-enabled hardware prototypes.

Components

Build Instructions

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1

Hardware requirements

For this tutorial, we chose the M5Stack Ecosystem because it has all the required modules in an easy-to-work way being modular and having a good open source community always building new use cases and bits of software.

The brain of this project is the M5Core2, an IoT development kit based on the ESP32 microcontroller. This development kit allows you to connect the provided modules through a GROVE port and has a handy touchscreen for running commands and debugging.

For monitoring the environmental conditions, we have picked the ENV II Unit, based on SHT30 and BMP280 sensors to measure atmospheric humidity, temperature, and pressure.

For measuring light intensity we have chosen the Light Sensor Unit with Photo-resistance based on LM393. It has a potentiometer that allows setting the sensibility of the sensor to a certain threshold.

To achieve automatic soil humidity we have used the Watering Unit with Moisture Sensor and Pump that has a sensor to measure the soil humidity level and automatically water the plant when the moisture drops under a certain threshold.
2
Wire connections
- Connect the ENV II Unit to PORT A of the M5Core2 (the red port near the USB-C connector) using the Grove cable.
Port A of the M5Core2
- Take out the CORE2 plate on the back to expose the pins.
- Connect the Light Sensor Unit using the Grove cable, the Grove to 4 Pin connector and the male to male Dupont wires to the following pins:
```
BLACK  - GNDRED    - 3.3VYELLOW - G26WHITE  - G35
```
- Connect the Watering Unit using the Grove cable, the Grove to 4 Pin connector and the male to male Dupont wires to the following pins:
```
BLACK  - GNDRED    - 5VYELLOW - G25WHITE  - G36
```
3
Prerequisites
- Install M5Burner according to your OS.
- Install Thonny following the steps on the official website.