Plant Control Loops
General Structure
The idea is to build small self contained, hopefully self configuring control loops for different environmental elements, staring with just watering
Each plant has it’s own individual soil sensor and a simple controller that maintains a control loop of reading soil capcitive moisture data and triggering watering cycles.
Watering trigger is just a 12V output so this can open a solenoid valve, run a peristaltic pump, etc
Centralized system
Example of a system with a centralized water source.
Once any of the controllers decides to trigger a watering cycle, the whole system is first pressurized by a central valve/pump
Option to integrate a flow sensor into the root of the system to detect water leaks
Watering control loop autoconfiguration via timelapse videos
Circuitboard design
Arbitrary control loop element
- 6-35V input voltage
- 4A max output for watering (or whatever)
- 0-5V analog read for a sensor
Wemos D1 as a controler running nodemcu. 7805 voltage regulator for controller power input, TIP120 for watering output. Can achieve smaller footprint with a double sided PCB
Housing
Software
Controller code in lua, running on top of nodemcu firmware
- wifi connected
- OTA
- centralized coordination via auto discoverable hass mqtt
- self contained control loops running when centralized control is unavailable