The Power Plant

Tired of never knowing how much to water your plants? Or do you just forget to water them at all? We have a solution.

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Inspiration

We made this project to develop a system to simplify helping the environment: while keeping and taking care of plants can be a great idea, it can be difficult to tell when one is over or under watering a plant. This system automates this process to ensure that plants are never over watered, under watered, or not watered at all.

What it does

This system detects the amount of moisture in the soil of and delivers water to two separate plants. When the soil moisture detector detects that the plant needs more water (the amount can be set based on the water needs of the plant itself). The water can be refilled via the two-Liter soda bottle, which contains a solenoid-controlled valve which releases water into the tube so it can flow towards the soil.

How we built it

This system required a physical setup with cut wood and cut soda bottles (after all, this project is environmentally focused). These soda bottles had valves and solenoids connected so that we could control the flow of water: at the end, we had vinyl tubing to reach the plant without spilling. Electronically, we used two solenoids, a Sparkfun Inventor's Kit, two soil moisture sensors, and a 9 Volt adapter. We programmed this system in the Arduino IDE and C.

Challenges we ran into

We dealt with several challenges. For most of the day, we had hoped to also develop an Android app to interface with our physical device. We even went as far as to design pages in App Inventor in the morning, but we were unable to get the Arduino to communicate with the app. We started with a wifi shield, but we wasted a lot of time trying to locate header pins. We then tried to use a Bluetooth receiver, but we were unsuccessful overall. Another problem we had involved powering a 12 V motor over a 5 V Arduino board. We found a solution, but then a plug on the long chain of power strips leading to the outlet unplugged, and we assumed it was a mistake on our part and wasted several hours trying to find another method.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of having a polished product by the end of this Hackathon. We all had relatively limited electronics knowledge, so it was definitely a journey, but it was very rewarding. Honestly, this product is complete in and of itself: it waters plants based on the soil's moisture and requires no activation, maintenance, or attention from the user.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Arduino and electronics through this project: we had to connect many sensors and motors, and we had very little prior knowledge and experience. The most important lesson, however, was that things often do not go as planned: from losing several hours due to an unplugged power strip to having to give up on a relatively developed app, much of our work felt like it went to waste.

What's next for Self-Watering Garden

To continue this project, we'd probably try to implement either WiFi or Bluetooth connectivity. Then, we could interface with the Android app and make features more customizable.

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