Which problem do we want to solve ?

Sometimes our plants are not irrigated. Maybe we forget, maybe distance could be a problem...

Our Solution:

For that reason we created Smart Plant, which is a watering system that allows to control, in real time, the state of our plants.

The system is controlled by an application, created for smartphone and gives possibility to the user to control the health state.

How we did it?

We use the Intel Edison board connected with our smartphone to control all the processes: moisture of the ground, temperature, humidity in the air

Step 1: Materials and Tools

All that you need

- Intel Edison Board

- Intel For Arduino Board

- Base Shield V2

- Temperature Sensor

- Moisture Sensor

- Led Bar

- Water Sensor

- 6v Mini Water Pump

- Breadboard (the one in the picture maybe too big, but we didn't have suitable sized board for that project at the moment)

- Some Jumpers

- Rele

- Potentiometer (optional)

Tools

- Android Studio

- Python

- Basic Mysql

- PHP

Step 2: Start Creating

We've created a plywood box to contain our project and sensor. Our plant was connected with the irrigation system and sensor are placed inside of the box.

Step 3: Connecting Board and Sensors

Before we tested water pump. After we connected all sensor to the Edison Board.

On the breadboard (picture) we can see that we used also a Rele and a Potentiometer. So with this two components we can activate the motor pump and control the water flux according to your and plant needs.

We use a battery supply (with 4 batteries 1.5V each) to power the water pump

Step 4: Start Coding

After connections, we started coding.

First of all we tested our sensor, to avoid the possibility of problems on them.

After, we started coding our Python Script. The main part of this Script, is a cycle where we control sensors status every 10 minutes.

Led Bar is used to show the health of our plant, calculated on optimal temperature and ground moisture.

Afterwards we programmed a mobile App that permits to select the interested plant and to irrigate it how many times we prefer.

If we forget to feed our plants a notification will be sent to your phone.

If notification is ignored and the ground moisture is in a critical state (in percentage), Edison board will calculate how much of water the plant needs to "bring back to life" our plant.

Obviously, if our plant needs 1 liter of water, Edison Board will feed the plant little by little up to the calculated water needed by plant