We have a plant hire business and I’d so love to create a dashboard view of all our plants and their relative moisture content… and potentially to be able to run a pump if say the moisture dips below a certain level (with a pump and water reservior contained in the pot)
Many places where we have our plants don’t have Wifi so I’m thinking a Sim based comms system is probably the way to go and can just send a small packet of mositure data each day.
In cases where we don’t have access to power I’d like to power the system with 18650 battery(s) and the system to be able to last for 6 weeks without recharging.
What would you suggest are my lowest cost options to be able to create the above ? If they work I’d like to build 50-100 of them…
I think a good place to start is this guide by @Michael from last year. I’m not saying you should build this exactly but it might give you inspiration.
Would you consider purchasing a wifi modem that runs off a sim card? That could serve many wifi enabled units. Most run on 12v. Maybe fewer points of failure?
Dude that’s awesome. Do you have team helping you or are you attempting this on your own? Such a large quantity a lot of the design will be focused on easy construction and reliability. Is it just you working on this alone or do you have staff that can assist?
Can you tell us a little more about this? For instance, is this something you should be able to access on your phone?
Tell us a bit about yourself.
Is this your first time working with electronics?
Have you ever programmed before? Preferred language?
What is your time line for this? Do you have 1 month of 6 months to get this done.
I think trying to make every plant self-contained with its own Cellular connection might blow the budget extremely quickly. I’d look into using a WiFi network for local communication and maybe have a single Hub that connects back over Cellular.
