Communicating Plant
For my final project for Creative Programming II the plan was to make a system that would allow my plant to tell me when it needs my care. I am historically bad at caring for plants because I am very forgetful. The system would use an Arduino Mega and sensors to tell me when the water level is too low or high and if the temperature is too low or high. The resulting project has a soil moisture sensor, water level sensor, and temperature/humidity sensor that display on an lcd screen as well as a message.
Soil Moisture Sensor:
The soil sensor I used was by SparkFun from amazon. This one had screws that can be used to hold the wires onto it, which I find to be incredibly helpful for something that may be moved around a lot. The sensor was easy to calibrate and set up. I used this tutorial: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/soil-moisture-sensor-hookup-guide/all
The moisture sensor sits in the top layer of the soil, but that doesn’t tell me how the bottom of the plant is doing so I chose to also use a water sensor.
Water Sensor:
The water sensor came with my Arduino Mega project kit. The water sensor will sit between the inner and outer plant pots to tell in water has gathered between them. The tutorial i used to learn about it was: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/omer-beden/basic-water-sensor-190c7a?ref=tag&ref_id=sensor&offset=79
Once these two were set up, I needed to display the results so I used an lcd display screen.
LCD Screen:
The lcd screen also came with my kit. The tutorial I used to learn about it was: https://www.makerguides.com/character-lcd-arduino-tutorial
The screen gives the readings for the sensors and a message that says “Hi, Im Planty2. Please help keep Me alive!” The screen scrolls to allow all of the information to be shown.
Issues along the way:
Once I had two sensors and the screen already hooked up and working, I tried to add the temperature sensor and wound up breaking what I had working. This was easily fixed by re-uploading the code for the previous sensors.
Temperature/Humidity Sensor:
I only want tor use the temperature part of this sensor. Once I had it set up I set it to display to the LCD with the other sensor. The tutorial I used to set it up is: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/techno_z/dht11-temperature-humidity-sensor-98b03b
All of them working together:
Link to code for all sensors together: https://github.com/DodsonH/Communicating-plant
Next Steps to improve on the project:
I want to continue to work on this project. I would like to add a motion sensor that allows the screen to be off unless someone is detected near by. I also want to learn how to use solar power to power up the whole system rather than plugging it into an outlet.