Introduction: Smart Gardening
There is no doubt in the fact that we all are so busy with our lives that we forget to take care of nature. As the technology is progressing, almost everything is being automated. Be it switching on the lights when someone enters the room or charging a battery and cutting off when it reaches its peak value.
In this project, we tried and succeeded in using our knowledge to make our life easier and our plant's life better.We used a soil moisture sensor which gives us the moisture values to Thingspeak Channel. Another module is used to read data from the MQTT server and turn on the solenoid valve which further turns on the water supply connected to the plants via a PVC pipe.
Step 1: Grab All the Components
Following are the components that are required to complete this project:
- Node-MCU: Buy From Here
- Soil-Moisture Sensor: Buy From Here
- CL100 Transistor: Buy From Here
- NCR Cell: Buy From Here
- Li-Ion Charger: Buy From Here
- Solenoid Valve: Buy From HererfffBuy From HereBuy From Here
Step 2: Wiring the Soil Moisture Sensor and Solenoid
Step 3: Working Logic
The Soil moisture sensor sends the moisture values to Thingspeak channel aided by the node-MCU. Firstly we were trying to read the last value of moisture on the Thingspeak channel and turn on the solenoid automatically from that value. But if the power goes or battery discharges, MCU will give 0 as the moisture value and the solenoid will turn on, resulting in running water.
There is another node MCU which is being employed just to turn On the water/solenoid.Since solenoid is a 12V device so we have to use a transistor(CL100) to amplify the current which can turn on the solenoid. Whenever we send a '1' message to the node-MCU from MQTT from our server, it will turn on the solenoid for 30sec and remain off until another '1' is received.
The status of the solenoid controlling MCU is also sent to Thingspeak Channel.