Arduino Use for a DT project any help appreciated.

I am creating a small desktop greenhouse for GCSE DT and I was wondering how I would go about creating basically two sensor systems with an Arduino one which measures humidity and if too low it turns on a small submersible pump that sends water to two sprayers and another which senses the temperatures and again, if too low it turns on a simple heating coil.

I was wondering how you would activate something that requires its own power supply and also how you would go about coding this/ is it feasible. I would also need a user-friendly way of changing these temp. and humidity parameters such as a little LCD screen. I don't mind spending some money as I will eventually use this product. - Any help would be very much appreciated. Many thanks. :slight_smile:

There are many different sensors to measure temperature and humidity. From cheap (and less accurate) DHT-11 or (better) DHT-22 or BME280. Or temperature only, SD18B20 or LN35. for instance.

For controlling pump and heater a relay or transistor can switch the external power to actuate them. When asking about a component, include salient specifications (ie. for a pump, supply voltage and stall current).

Your question is really too general to answer without writing a whole tutorial. Break up the project into small pieces and work to realize each piece on its own. Pick a temperature sensor. Learn to interface and code for it. There will be lots of help for that by searching this site or google. Then humidity, control a pump or control a heater. Add "arduino" to your search term for better results ("arduino control heater" for instance).

Ask more specific questions for more specific help.

Read the forum guidelines to see how to ask questions that can be answered.

Study the examples in the IDE.

Look up Garduino. This sort of thing is common - you can find other people's implementations.

The most likely thing to trip you up is electrical interference when the pump is powered up & down. A relay board would help. And of course you can't power the pump from the Arduino - it must have its own supply.

wildbill:
And of course you can't power the pump from the Arduino - it must have its own supply.

You can't actually "power" anything of significance from an Arduino - it is a microcontroller board, not in any respect a "power supply".

What this means is that you need a power supply for the Arduino.

It operates on 5 V, nothing else. If you have a 5 V - regulated - power supply to power other things such as a pump or a relay module to control the pump, then with due care in the wiring layout, you can use this same supply to power the Arduino (Nano more practical than UNO) via the "5V" pin and ground, otherwise you need to power it with a 5 V supply such as a USB "phone charger" or a switchmode "buck" regulator module from a higher voltage such as 12 V.