Plant_io Basic Setup Guide | Automatically Water a Seedling Based on Soil Moisture

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I just shared a new guide: “Plant_io Basic Setup Guide | Automatically Water a Seedling Based on Soil Moisture”



This guide will help you set up a Plant_io controller to automatically irrigate a plant of your choice :smiley:
Along the way, we’ll

  1. Assemble a hardware platform, connect electronics to measure soil moisture and deliver water to the soil.
  2. Plumb a pump to deliver water, and locate a soil moisture sensor into a growing medium.
  3. Log data over a long period to observe how the controller is working and how effective our growing strategy is.

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Is it possible to hookup several soil moisture sensors and have them in a garden bed, and the pump irrigating different parts of the the bed as needed through say a relay? I’m an older adult with a Pi 4 8gb, wanting to do something with it when the Pi 5 comes out. I’m new to programming, but this plant_io project has sparked my interest.

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Hi Steve,

Sure is! The Pi SBCs might not be the best candidate for this vs the Pico since there are dedicated ADCs and they are quite a bit more expensive.

Pimoroni have their Grow boards which might be worth a look in.

There’s a couple other additions I think would be worth adding so will be making some custom PCBs in the future, if you have any suggestions, send them through!

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Shall do. I’m thinking redundancies that could be actioned through IoT, like refilling the water reservoir, using a camera and viewing progress of the plants’ growth while away, or to have a visual record to go with the data from seed to adult plant.

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Hi Steve,

Almost exactly what I am thinking, with cameras not limited to SBC’s and now usable with MCU’s like the Pico there are so many possibilities. Once I’m finished uni assignments there ought to be some updates on this project :smiley:

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