Hello , I did some little projects with Arduino a year ago , but now I was wondering if I could make a more complex thing, considering that my knowledge of electronics is not very deep and I am not expert with the tools needed to craft items and devices, I would like to ask for some help , guidance or assistance in making this little thing.
Basically I wanted to make an irrigation system for my plants .
I want to miniaturize it,
Work wirelessly and be controllable with a remote app on pc or else.
so I need to use miniaturized water pump , I see they are 3-6 v, then a miniature water nebulizer that makes mist and fog , I want those items to be remteluy alimented with a battery so that each plant has its own , I want them to receive wirelessly the commands to activate or not and when .
I want a central unit with timer, display , and that to give and send commands to the subunits for each plant device, this will be also sending and receiving commands to remote system .
Also this I want to be alimented with batteries and not rely on power plugs ...
Now is it possible to do ? Its hard? what item tools you sugest me and where and how to start?
Thanks for any consideration for this weird idea.
In this case, in my opinion, the most difficult thing is to assemble the hydraulic system itself and make it miniature. And the code for controlling the arduino is relatively simple here and there are examples on the network
You can program an 'app' in a program called processing. You can see that as the computer application equivalent of arduino. Both are of the same developers iirc. I personally find processing really simply. A lot of the syntax is near identical to what you type in Arduino.
What is also possible is to have your processing app working on a phone as well but I haven't tried that myself.
I would use Wemos D1 boards for hardware. They are cheap and have WiFi. With processing you can set up a server on your PC and the Wemos D1 boards can be clients. They also come with battery shields. Ofcourse you can also program one Wemos to act as server and attach an OLED and some buttons for control or something..
In a nutshell:
So I would start with these 2 steps in any order #1, go download & learn Processing and program a nice GUI. Though simple there is a learning curve involved. #2, buy Wemos D1 boards and go do something with it, read out a moisture sensor and turn on a pump or whatever
#3
When you have something working I would try to set up the Wifi connection between the two. With the existing ethernet/wifi libraries that is actually not as hard as it sounds.
#4 with the knowledge you now possess, rethink what you are trying to do, break it down to steps and start working out the details.
General tips:
Write things down.
Try to explain things to yourself like if you are you'r mum. This may 'humanize' some difficult problems, so you can understand better.
Talk out loud in your self.. for real
Do you mean you want each & every sensor & actuator to be wireless?
Of course, that's doable - but it's non-trivial.
Frist, you will have to decide what sort of "wireless" you want - there are very many options.
Then you will have to manage a large network over that "wireless" link.
Wireless is inherently unreliable - so you will have to be very careful with resilience to errors/failures.
Each sensor & actuator will be an Arduino project in itself.
Alternatively, you could have the sensors & actuators wired, and just (sic) a wireless link from the main "hub"?
It might be easier to not do that on an Arduino - just have the Arduino as a comms "hub", and the control on a PC or Raspberry Pi or something.
That, of course, is a whole different ballpark of programming...
