This project was completed for Dr. Bhattacharya's ECE 1000 class. The goal was to create an automatic plant watering system using a soil moisture sensor.
Using a Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor (HW-390), a Single-Channel Relay (Keyes-SR1y), a rotary encoder (KY-040), a switch, a small pump, an RGB LED, a Raspberry Pi Pico WH, and an accompanying breakout board, I designed a device for detecting the water level or humidity of a hydroponic/geoponic system. A pump wired into a relay is powered when the water level is detected to be low by the soil moisture sensor and will pump water from a reservoir into the container. A rotary encoder is included to enable easy adjustment of the desired moisture level, and the LED serves as a visual indicator. The switch can be used to manually activate the pump.
- Step 1 - Download Thonny IDE and install
- Step 2 - Launch Thonny and select the Run dropdown
- Step 3 - Select "Configure interpreter" and choose "MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico)" from the dropdown menu
- Step 4 - Connect the Rasberry Pi Pico to the computer via USB
- Step 5 - Open the script and run it using Thonny
- The required pins for the sensor, relay, encoder, switch, and pump are defined in the script
Benjamin Clark ([email protected], +1(281)638-6006)