Robotically monitor and irrigate your raised backyard mattress with the Arduino Cloud

As part of his new raised backyard mattress venture, Shawn Murphy was in search of methods to enhance his yard even additional with clever IoT programs. Aside from the present 1800W photo voltaic panel array, he additionally wanted a device that would report present climate and soil situations in real-time and even carry out some watering duties with out the necessity for human intervention.

Initially, Murphy had researched establishing a pump that would take water from a pair of rain storing barrels and ship it to the backyard mattress. Nevertheless, this could have been pricey to construct and preserve, so he as a substitute went with a gravity-fed setup. On this configuration, gravity would transfer water down-slope to a solenoid valve connected to the Arduino IoT Explorer Kit’s 24V relay pin. As soon as wired collectively, he added a soil moisture sensor for measuring the water content material of the soil, together with a 12V battery pack and photo voltaic cost controller for off-grid energy.

The ensuing {hardware} was then loaded with a sketch that would regularly learn the moisture content material of the soil, activate the solenoid valve if crucial, and even activate a small fan if the enclosure had been to get too scorching. Better of all, the WiFi connectivity of the IoT Explorer Equipment allowed Murphy to ship the values remotely to an Arduino Cloud dashboard, full with toggle switches for manually overriding the solenoid valve if crucial.

For extra details about this venture, watch Murphy’s movies beneath and read his write-up on Hackster.io.