The purpose of an indoor plant is not only to enhance the overall appearance of your house, but they have been shown to also eliminate air pollutants, making a healthier environment for you. However, to make this true, a plant need to be feed and treated at least a few times a week. If you are around, this will be no problem, to water a plant will take no time, but the question is, what if you are on vacation, or if you need to travel away for a couple of weeks? How will you take care of your plant to keep it green and healthy?
The Device presented here will be a solution to that problem. This Device will be in charge of monitoring the soil moisture of your plant each hour. If the sensor detects a low value(lower than 1000), then a message will be sent to your phone, telling you that the plant needs water. Just then, you can reply with another message, for example "water", this will trigger a micro servo motor to open the valve of a container full of water, the water will run trough a hose to water the plant. If the container ever runs out of water, another sensor (water level sensor) will let the user know, and the device will blink and LED 3 times. In addition, there is also included a light intensity sensor which will track the amount of light that the plant receives on any period of time. The Device will blink once every time the light sensor takes a reading.
Data for the soil moisture monitoring is updated each time the sensor takes a reading which is about 1 hour. This allow enough time for the graph to update correctly and avoid saturation of messages if the readings were taken more frequently. Figure 1 shows an example of data taken for a small amount of soil going from wet to dry, and then wet again.
In addition, the device takes a reading of the ambient light levels once every 5 minutes. Figure 2 shows light exposure early in the morning. For reference, sunlight through a window measures approximately 8000 lux.
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