I had this idea and I realised after that other people had too but thought I'd knock something up from parts I had. I was initially planning this as a how to build it for £5 but in all reality i think this probably comes under that quite easily without any major concessions. I took a photo of the parts I was planning to use but then I decided I would go the prototype route with no soldering so used a breadboard and the appropriate connectors. I don't do this enough really and it saves faf later on by not having to resolder things. I got this up and running really quickly which i was happy with.

I've put a small video showing the design in a little more detail which is included.

Oh and you shall notice I'm actually missing some tubing as I've not had a chance to purchase a tube to run from the water reservoir to the plant pot yet, going to get it this week.

Step 1: Wiring It All Up

I used the following components

Arduino Uno (clone)
2 x 220 resistor
Red LED
Green LED
Relay module (link)
Soil Moisture sensor (link)
5-6v pump (link)
Breadboard
Powerbank

The soil moisture sensor was connected to pin 2

The relay module was connected to pin 3

The LED's were connected to pin's 4 and 5

auto-water.fzz
Download

Step 2: Code

The code is quite basic but I've put it on github as i plan to work on this so it's nice to have a common place to hold the code.

https://github.com/chickey/autowater

/*

Flower Soil Mosture Sensor

D2 - Soil Mosture Sensor

D3 - Relay module

D4:D5 - LEDS 1,2

LED1 - Green

LED2 - Red

Connect the Soil Moisture Sensor to Digital input pin 2 and your 2 led's to digital out 4-5

*/

int moistureSensor = 2;

int relay = 3;

int led1 = 4;

int led2 = 5;

void setup()

{

// setting the led pins to outputs

pinMode(led1, OUTPUT);

pinMode(led2, OUTPUT);

// setting the Relay pin to output

pinMode(relay, OUTPUT);

// Serial Begin so we can see the data from the moisture sensor in our serial input window.

Serial.begin(9600); }

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:

void loop()

{

// read the input on digital pin 2:

int sensorValue = digitalRead(moistureSensor);

// print out the value you read:

Serial.println(sensorValue);

digitalWrite(relay, HIGH);

digitalWrite(led1, LOW);

digitalWrite(led2, HIGH);

if (sensorValue == 1) {

digitalWrite(led1, HIGH);

digitalWrite(led2, LOW);

digitalWrite(relay, LOW);

Serial.println("Watering");

delay(10000);

// run pump for 10 seconds

Serial.println("Finished watering"); }

delay(1000);

// delay 1 second between reads

}

Step 3: Conclusion

This is an extremely simple design and I plan to expand on it more, possibly looking into using either WiFi via ESP8266 or via radio with a NRF24L01+. The WiFi option has the advantage that I may be able to do away with the arduino then, just need to learn a bit of lua.

I should add my plants don't normally look like that lol, I grabbed a nearly dead plant from outside just to test the sensor with.