I am about to begin building and sketching a garduino.
Currently looking for advice on best way to go for hardware, I would really like to do ALL of this only using the Arduino and not a Rpi. It needs to detect moisture of soil and automatically water if needed and to report readings to the cloud for remote viewing. Once functional I would like to add a small oled lcd for viewing temperature and humidity locally, as well as a water level sensor and speaker for the reservoir. Also a camera to check on the progess of my plants
Arduino Mega 2560
Wifi ATWINC1500
SparkFun Soil Moisture Sensor
Digital temperature and humidity sensor
water solenoid
solar
Water level sensor
speaker
lcd
rtc
camera
Please read the first post in any forum entitled how to use this forum. http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,148850.0.html then look down to item #7 about how to post your code.
It will be formatted in a scrolling window that makes it easier to read.
Can you please post a copy of your circuit, in CAD or a picture of a hand drawn circuit in jpg, png?
I think the camera is going to put this well beyond the capabilities of the Mega. Other than that, it should be possible. With the camera you're probably going to want to go with the RPi. You need to understand that the 8 bit microcontroller on the Mega has only a tiny fraction of the performance and resources of the computers, phones, tablets that you're used to. You could probably get some very low resolution images at a slow update rate with the Mega, but nothing more.
OP,
Why the Arduino VS. RPI? Why not using both? Write your arduino code to read sensors, turn on water, and take simple commands via serial port for water on/off and report sensor readings. Use RPI with RTC isn't hard at all. Camera will be more possible and wifi/cloud easier than achieving it with arduino. You get the best of both.
you can break some new ground. the ESP32 has a version that has a camera. The ESP32 has more memory and a faster processor.
Also, you will need to get WiFi to post to the web. the ESP32 has that built in
if you only want to take a snap-shot of your plants, a daily or hourly record of growth, that might fit the bill. From what I have seen, it takes about half a second to take a picture and send the data, so live stream is not on the table.
I too have looked at the RPi, but the fact that it is for prototype and hobbyists and not for long term embeded applications makes it less than desirable. If they ever figure a way for it to not burn up SD cards, it might be more attractive for projects like this. For the cost of an RPi and a SSD, you can buy a mini computer so, you might consider using the Arduino for all your sensors and the mini computer for the camera, data storage and web connections. That way, you can host an active webpage locally and access that from anywhere via the net.
