NEW TO ARDUINO

Projects General Guidance
1

I am a newbie to ARDUINO but have been involved in Industrial Process Automation most of my life. I know the processes and devices that are available in the manufacturing world and I am hoping to bring a small piece of it into my indoor grow room with ARDUINO technology.

Being a gearhead and a tech geek with limited experience, automation has always fascinated me. I know there are a number of projects out there related to grow room automation. I will use them whenever I can but I am going to enjoy the experience of trying to create my own.

I have some questions that I hope someone can answer...

I currently take four moisture reading around the periphery of a 20 gallon pot. I take the average of the four readings and if the value is on or below my low moisture limit, I water the plant. My questions are:

  1. Can the four readings be transmitted(hopefully wirelessly) collected, averaged and plotted (in the form of an excel file/graph).

  2. Can the reading, if it falls below the low moisture limit target, initiate a watering cycle.

  3. Can this watering cycle be time based or moisture based? In other words, watering based on time would factor in the volume of water that the plant would receive until you deliver the expected measure of water. Or, if the moisture sensor read a high moisture level reading, it would cause the pump to shut down.

I'm pretty sure the second and third questions are doable but I am really interested in knowing if the first question is possible.

2

  1. YES

  2. YES

  3. YES

What...who mentioned moving ? :slight_smile:

Bob.

3

ballscrewbob:
Also moving you to a more suitable area.

Where?

4

SteveMann:
Where?

Here.

...R

5

OK, it looked like you were moving the thread from Project Guidance...

6

lots of first here.

first, welcome to the forums.
and your first post was pretty coherent.

seeing that you are new, you might have missed How To Use This Forum,
it is posted as a sticky post on the top of each forum to go over the simple things easier for all.

Being new to the internet, Welcome there as well, one of the observed pleasantries we observe is no shouting.
all caps is considdered bad form for the most part.

Also, welcome to forums in general, your first post seems to have incorporated one of the more common mistakes of what we endearingly call noobs. that is a subject line of no value. it is certain, if you were to want to find someone's thread on plant watering, you would not use "new to Arduino' in google as the search term.
but, here, the subject line is very important. considder someone who knows and understands batch processing, PLC's and PID, assume for a moment that only 1% of those who scour these lists for interesting things might read about them.
and they read 'new to arduino'

or, consider they read, "multi point wireless soil moisture batch processing with PIC and PLCs "

a little over the top, but this is meant to be an example.

as for a tip, the bottom right of your first post (all posts) is more, options, modify
you can edit your post and can alter the subject line for the thread.

as another tip, many will not read posts of " newest noob has newest noob question "
or "NEED URGENT HELP"

so, welcome to the forum, let the fun begin !

7

Thanks for this advice....Cheers

8

dave-in-nj:
Also, welcome to forums in general, your first post seems to have incorporated one of the more common mistakes of what we endearingly call noobs.

Because we were all once noobs. Some more recent than others.

So, to answer your original questions.
Yes, yes and, yes.

Here's the approach I would take- there are others just as good, maybe better, but I only know what is in my wheelhouse (parts box).

Note, my solution requires a dedicated Raspberry Pi running an MQTT broker (most of us use Mosquitto). It can be the same Raspberry Pi used in step 2.

  1. A capacitive moisture sensor on a Wemos D1 Mini (compatible with the Arduino IDE). It would transmit the moisture readings periodically (the period is up to you) via MQTT to a central controller.

2 & 3) I would have Node Red running on a Raspberry Pi that would receive the moisture data and make watering decisions for you. Water solenoids could also be controlled from Node Red also by sending MQTT messages to a Wemos D1 Mini connected to the solenoid. It could be the same Wemos D1 Mini.

Graphing the data has many solutions. You could build a daily data file and post it to a NAS on your home network then mungle it with Excel. You could also use Home Assistant which has a graphing capability. Many people just skip Node Red and use Home Assistant but I am more comfortable writing functions in Node Red than with automations in Home Assistant.

Note 2- All this could also be done with a Raspberry Pi Zero-W instead of the Wemos to send data and control solenoids, and a Raspberry Pi as the controller, but since you have an embedded processor background, I think you will be more at home than learning Python to write code for the Raspberries. And you wouldn't have the outstanding and very helpful Arduino community to ask for Raspberry help.

Oh, edit your first post to change the thread title.