hello everyone, I really want to start on my project, autonomous plant incubator. I wanted it to regulate the preferred humidity and temperature of a specific plant however, I'm so troubled on how to regulation process will be done.
For any and all control systems you will need actuators, which are the devices that affect the physical variables, in your case temperature and humidity. You have to decide if your system will have to push both of these variables up or down (i.e. heat up, cool down, add or extract humidity), and then select the corresponding devices accordingly, making sure you have a way to have the Arduino drive them. In most cases relays, FETs and IC drivers are used.
Your system needs sensors, which are the devices that will convert the physical variables to electrical/logical signals that can be read by an Arduino. The sensor selection will usually depend on the value ranges of the physical variables to be regulated, and on the expected cable lengths.
Finally, you will need a control algorithm, which is the logic embedded in a program that makes sure the selected system variables stay within the required values.In its simplest form, such algorithm gets the sensor readings as input values to the Arduino and after comparing them to the established limits and perhaps to previous readings, it calculates the output that will make the actuators correct or maintain the physical variables regulated.
And you need a way to power the Arduino, the sensors and the actuators with a suitable power supply.
I know this is rather theoretical, but you have to be more specific about your project and your doubts.
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Welcome to the forum.
You have the benefit of being the 1,242,689th person to dare to undertake this kind of project.
Adding Arduino to any search will focus the results. Next time you have time google
arduino temperature humidity control
and poke around. You will see exactly sensors and actuators and heating and so forth all managed by a sketch in an Arduino.
a7
The first thing you need to do is find the sensors needed. To do this you need to determine what they are going to measure, what sensitivity is needed, Is it cost reasonable, what is the ambient the sensors will be in. Be sure the extremes the sensor will see are in its range. That will let you know if you need to interface to it digitally or analog. Then you need to define what the outputs will be. Also important is lead length and wire size. At this point you can design the circuit.
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