I threw together a sensor node to collect some more detailed soil moisture data in my planter boxes. This is using an ESP32 with 3 capacitive soil moisture sensors. I connected that to Adafruit IO to collect and graph the data.
Tag: plants
My Urban Garden has taken off!
My urban dwelling may not have a yard, but we do have a deck that is bigger than my last downtown apartment. Years ago I added four planter boxes made from industrial crates and a few pots hear and there. This year things are doing super well… Continue reading My Urban Garden has taken off!
Time to grow some data…
Last weekend I decided to build a monitoring system for the planter boxes on my deck. I wanted to collect data on soil moisture and light levels from at least two of the 4 planter boxes. The issue is that I don’t have a place to plug it all into and I want to log the data using Google Sheets so that I can graph everything.
So I grabbed a solar panel, whipped up a voltage regulator, connected a rechargeable battery and that took care of the battery. For the microcontroller I used a Particle Photon, mostly due to it’s abundance of analog read pins, and connected a Spark Fun soil sensor with an added photo-resister for light readings. The Photon reads the analog value of each sensor and adds a new row into my Google Sheets doc via IFTTT. After the data is sent the Photon goes into deep sleep mode every 10 minutes. This makes it so that the sensor sips power and can easily last using only solar power.
So here is the Data:
My next step is to collect enough data to flag events that I want to be notified about. Like when the water level gets low enough to were I should water my plants, or when my plats are about to die due to extreme dryness. I can also see how much daylight a particular box is getting so I know what plants need to go where. If I had access to a water outlet I could have that automatically water the garden, but for now my water bucket works well enough.
Such a nice day
This is the first day when it has been nice weather and I don’t have loads of work to do. So I thought it would be nice to take a trip to get some plants for the garden.
Along the way I stopped to take some photos of some blown out windows from the coffee house that exploded a few weeks ago.
While all of the shops still have plywood in the windows…
most have gotten artists to paint them with colorful murals. Here are a few from around the neighborhood.
Later I got a bag full of plants.
Then I got the garden all set up.
Lettuce is on the Left, herbs, root veggies, then spinach and other cook-able greens.