Some of you have noticed that the lobby plants get neglected quite often and we can correct that by designing and installing a watering system that monitors each plant and supplies water when needed. We are currently looking for volunteers with all levels of experience from none to expert to design, build and install the system. If you are interested please fill out this FORM and we can get started.
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I built this last year for my office plant. I call him Lil’ Pumpy. Works pretty well, plant is still alive.
EDIT: This can run standalone with Tasmota, but I connect it to OpenHAB to run on a schedule.
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An exciting electronics project to be sure, and I think it’s always worth doing whatever will be fun and a learning opportunity, but I’m wondering if it has major benefits over something like these Plant watering globes ?
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Fan of the Wemos D1 / ESP8266 here. What is that web UI and how is the MCU communicating with it?
Does that device have a capacitive sensor or are you adding water without considering soil dryness?
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@Iammikecohen the tasmota firmware has a lightweight UI (pump01.lan ui), but I really just use that to initially configure the module: set pin configurations, wifi, and MQTT settings. Wemos (tasmota) pub/subs to MQTT. I have OpenHab (Nik Plant Watering Schedule ui) + mosquitto (mqtt broker) + grafana running on a raspberry pi.
I have a capacitive soil sensor connected, but I find it very unreliable. I switched to a weekly watering schedule.
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I’m really late, but David mentioned this project to me today, so I’d like to bump the thread and see what I can do to help get the ball rolling. 
Who else is still interested?
Some of the plants are doing alright, but others are barely holding on! 
I have experience with microcontrollers, soldering, web development, and Python, but controlling water pumps is not something I’ve never looked into.
I’m sure there are a lot of ways to approach that from an engineering standpoint. Does anyone have a vision for how the plumbing for multiple plants with differing watering schedules might be controlled?
Multiple peristaltic pumps seems inefficient/overkill… Maybe a reservoir above the plants that’s scheduled to open/close open and close valves attached to tubes that run to each plant?
I don’t know much about horticulture, but I’m confident I can figure out how to plan a “per-plant” watering schedule and write the code to control the hardware, it’s just a matter of deciding on the right hardware and working backward from there.
Looking forward to hearing other’s thoughts about the best way to automate the plant watering!
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