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| Ideas for Automatic garden watering system project? |
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| rfengg:
Folks, I am looking for ideas and suggestions to implement an automatic garden watering system in our garden. I am aware that there may be commercial, off the shelf systems that may suit my requirements but I would like to take this on as a personal project from scratch. My requirement is that I should be able to automatically turn on the water for the drip irrigation system for 10 mins only every hour. I am thinking of getting a solenoid water valve to control the system such that the water supply for the drip irrigation system is ON for 10 mins and OFF for 50 mins every hour but do not know how to setup the electronics to drive this? Would something like Arduino to set this up be the best option? |
| admiralk:
Some time ago I started a similar project, for a misting system, using a Nextion display. I think it got too complicated for the way that works. I recently started rethinking the project using regular AVR chips. Arduino would probably work fine depending on the complexity of the interface. If you just want to plug it in and not worry about changing the settings, Arduino would probably be the simplest approach. If you care at all about the accuracy of when it switches, you will need to use a RTC also. At its simplest, it is just a blinky program; on 10 minutes / off 50 minutes. How complicated you want to get after that will determine what is best to use. |
| wilfred:
My first thought was to have a comparator monitor the charging of a capacitor over an hour. Switch on when the voltage is zero or at some threshold and off when the voltage passes the next threshold. A 60minute sawtooth. A pot or two could make adjustments easy. I also thought about a small pump to charge an elevated reservoir (ie a bucket) from which water would be gravity fed. I have thought about this as a solution for watering pot plants whilst absent. A small scale issue for a family member. I even considered loops of tubing with drip feed holes at the bottom of each loop and one loop or two for larger pots. About 12 pots in total. Each loop would contain the required quantity of water and the level monitored by a small bead in each loop. The loops of tubing would form the elevated reservoir. This would highlight the drip hole getting blocked. There is an air conditioner on the balcony with the pots and the pump was a way of incorporating the outflow of water from it. |
| floobydust:
So far it's just a timer you need to connect to your solenoids. I'm not a fan of simple watering systems because they are not smart enough: If it's raining, you probably don't want to water. If the weather is hot and sunny, you need more water. If it's cold and cloudy, you need less. If it rained solid for a day or two, probably don't need water for a day or two. A good quality soil moisture sensor would help. I would use an ESP32 in the Arduino ecosystem, so you have remote (Web) access, if you are the smarts deciding to turn on/off, like if you are away on holidays etc. Otherwise, it's possible to grab local weather conditions on the Internet and decide automatically in your software if you choose to make it smart. |
| ledtester:
--- Quote from: rfengg on August 07, 2019, 12:26:58 am ---Would something like Arduino to set this up be the best option? --- End quote --- Yes - just google "arduino watering" for lots of ideas and examples. Most of the cheap "moisture sensors" have problems of one form or another. Here's a video which reviews a bunch of them: |
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