DIY Home Plant Watering System

This project is a combination of multiple projects that wuere suggested with respect to home based plant watering system. To build one such project you will need Arduino NanoR3 (1), Adafruit Standard LCD – 16×2 White on Blue, a mini water pump, a rotary encoder with push button, L298n IC, photo resistor, a general purpose transistor NPN, a resistor with 10k Ohms, single turn potentiometer-10K ohms, a capacitor 10µF, a capacitor of 1000µF, 470µF, and 100nF, a 1N4001 diode, soil moisture sensor, screw terminal block, RCA socket, AMS1117-ADJ, a resistor 680 ohm, a resistor of 2k Ohm, and power supply DC 9v 3A and a generic soldering iron.

Though there are a number of projects on internet that speak of a system like this, but this one took good points from all and fused those with a single software. The controller in this project support two plants which means it has two independent channels and the maker can disable any one of them. It is on manual mode, you can water any plant by pushing the button, the controller monitors humidity of plant after watering it. It also uses the light sensor in order to keep water from running at night.

In order to measure soil measure,it is advised to go as per the capacitance of plants and not their resistance. The difference between wet and dry plant can be easily measured by difference in their capacitance. Another special point that needs to be mentioned here is that you need not measure accuracy of capacitor meter exactly. You can always use two analog pins that will visibly differentiate between “wet” and “dry” plants.

In order to manage the plant controller you will need a rotary encoder. Once the controller starts working the moon screen will come. You will see a few parameters on display such as left channel,right channel, display backlight brightness, channel enable, pump forward running time, and others. The controller is designed over two 3x7cm double sided PCBs. The first one is used for 1298n motor driver,screw terminal blocks, and the diodes for connecting motor pumps, sensor connectors,and power supply.The board also has a DC power supply module AMS1117-adj for obtaining 5v for arduino and 1298n. Using a separate voltage regulator will be more convenient as and when you debug this segment of your controller. You can always place a regulator over voltage regulator for getting stable 5v.