Pico plant waterer
Vanessa Bradley and Martin Spendiff of VEEB Projects like to take holidays. What they don’t like is the rather awkward task of asking a neighbour to leave their own house and come all the way into their house to water their plants. So they built an automatic plant waterer powered by Raspberry Pi Pico.
I need one of these because I’m a terrible plant-waterer even when I’m not on holiday. I have resigned myself to only keeping cacti at home because I can’t keep anything else alive.
Parts list
- Raspberry Pi Pico
- Waveshare SSD1351 1.5-inch RGB OLED module
- WGCD KY-040 Rotary Encoder
- Capacitive soil moisture sensor
- Relay switch
- Fish tank water pump
How does it work?
Raspberry Pi Pico runs code that constantly monitors the soil moisture levels measured by a sensor. When a reading comes back indicating that the soil is too dry, it triggers a relay switch that adds a squirt of water from the water pump. Another moisture reading is taken, and if the soil is still too dry, more water is added until the sensor is satisfied that the plant has had enough to drink.
The full title of the build is Clive Moss, the Window Box Boss. Yes, really.
As with all of VEEB Projects‘ builds, the code is available for free in their GitHub repo so you can go ahead and save the lives of all your own indoor plants.
Cook burgers with Raspberry Pi Pico
Vanessa and Martin were inspired to do this project after realising that this burger cooking device they’d built around Pico could easily be tweaked to do something more… normal.
5 comments
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Dylan Burrows
I was wondering if it would be somehow possible to have some sort of multiple output that opens when. The moisture is called for and closes when signal stops like the pump. So the same signal opens the required port while sending for water. You could then use a tank controlled by a simple toilet tank float the keept.the tank full to feed all the pants in the group. Only issue is where to buy something like that to open and close specific.
Sergio
Just use multple pumps. :)
Nguyễn Hằng
The reason of it is so funny :v
Mita
Can you describe which relay switch you’ve used here? Does it have to 3V or 5V? Thanks!
Olof Albertsson
This is a really cool project, I just wish there were a better explanation, either by video or written, with links to parts on aliexpress or ebay.