How to make an Automated Watering System! Automating a Greenhouse with LoRa! (Part 3)

So you just finished building your own DIY greenhouse which I partly showed you how to do in a previous video. But you completed it by adding more aluminium tape to the roof as well as an aluminium ledge to the roof tip and let's not forget about proper handles for the door. You also took the liberty to create a simple wood square with the help of metal brackets, attached hinges to it as well as a twin wall sheet piece and cut out a rectangle out of your greenhouses twin wall sheets in order to attach that wood square there to create a proper window. All that is now left to do is to get your plants in there and enjoy gardening but then you suddenly realize something. While you do have a reliable source of water in your garden and visit your garden every 2 days which means that watering by hand should not be a problem, wouldn't it be awesome to automate that process? I mean that is also what lots of viewers asked for after watching part 2 of my greenhouse automation video series. And that is exactly what I will be showing you in this video by creating an automated watering system that will water the plants in my greenhouse by either pushing a button next to it or by sending a command through the internet if I am on vacation or something similar. Let's get started! This video is sponsored by JLCPCB! Feel free to visit their website JLCPCB.com to not only find out what awesome PCB and Assembly services they offer but also to easily upload your Gerber files and thus order affordable and high quality PCBs quickly. Now before getting to the DIY watering system to which you can skip by following this time mark, I have to address the big elephant in the room. What happened to the electronics when the old greenhouse got destroyed and in which way did I install them in the new greenhouse. Well first off, most of the electronics did survive without a problem like the battery, solar panel, solar charge controller and temperature/humidity sensor. But sadly the motorized window opener lost a part, the main LoRa board had its antenna connector ripped off and the wood chest as the enclosure did also not survive. But thankfully I got a LoRa board replacement lying around and ordering another wood chest was also not difficult. So after painting the chest, I added the previously created roof to it, drilled holes into its backside, added the mandatory 5V regulator to the new LoRa board, placed all the electronics inside the enclosure, mounted the solar panel to the roof, hung the temperature sensor inside the greenhouse, guided all the wires into the chest and finally wired everything up in pretty much the same way as I showed you in part 1 of this video series. What is noteworthy though, is that now securing wires inside the greenhouse is much easier to do due to the used wood into which I can hammer all kinds of things. And also I used a new kind of antenna; not only for the greenhouse end but also for the LoRa gateway in my apartment which makes the connection between both sides super stable. Now you might be asking yourself why I didn't repair my motorised window opener and installed it and the reason is simplicity. For a simpler but also reliable solution I instead went with such automatic temperature controlled window opener. After installing them to my wooden frame and windows with a couple of screws, they require no electricity at all in order to open up the windows when it gets too hot inside the greenhouse. They do so with a liquid inside them that expands when they get hot and thus they push the windows open, it's so simple its brilliant. OK and now that we are all up to date with the electronics installed inside the greenhouse, how do we make an automated watering system? Well, the first component required was such a big rainwater barrel that can hold 300L. My idea is that I will attach a water level sensor at the lower part of the barrel, underneath which I will also mount a tap. The tap will then connect to a solenoid valve through a common garden hose which will also be used after the valve and inside the greenhouse in order to basically distribute the water in there. To achieve that I simply had to add a sealing end to the hose and drill 3.5mm holes into it so that water can escape there and water my plants. So the mechanical side of things is pretty straightforward; when the solenoid valve is turned on and thus open, the weight of the water creates a force that pushes it out of the garden hose. But you might be asking yourself why I didn't use a normal pump to get water from my usual water well into the greenhouse. Well, the reason is that my groundwater starts at a depth of around 3m and bringing that up requires quite a bit of energy and a powerful pump which my 12V 44Ah battery will not be able to power for long. Also my water well is 5m away from my greenhouse and I didn't feel like running wires and hoses over such a distance. That is why I placed my barrel right next to the greenhouse, let gravity do most of the work and fill the barrel either up with rain or with other rain water I collected in different barrels. And with that being said, what about the electronics side of things? Well, connecting the water level sensor was pretty straightforward by connecting one side to GND and the other side to pin A0 of the LoRa board which will use its internal pull up resistor to pull the input up to 3.3V. As soon as there is enough water in the barrel, the sensors buoy will rise up, close its internal reed switch and thus will let the LoRa board know that it can activate the solenoid vale. Now directly connecting this valve to the LoRa board however was not possible, because the solenoid requires 12V at 1.6A to activate which the LoRa board both can not offer. So I had to use such a simple relay board which I connected to pin D4 and the solenoid valve like this. Last but not least I added a push button for manual activation to pin A1 and built up the electronics system for some testing on my workbench according to this finalized schematic. What was missing though was the code which I pretty much recycled from part 2 of this video series; by only adding the new inputs and outputs, activating the solenoid if a code word is sent and the water level sensor says I am fine with it or activating the solenoid manually with the button if the water level sensor is also fine with it. So after uploading this code to the system, we can see that by sending over the code word, the system behaves just like expected, perfect. And of course the push button execution did also work just fine. That means it was time to break up my test setup and start drilling a big hole into my water barrel. In there I secured a metal feed-through, into which I then screwed my tap. And let's not forget to add two more adapters to the tap which makes it compatible with a standard garden hose. As soon as that was done, I drilled another hole a bit higher and to the left from the tap in order to mount the water level sensor there. Almost the last preparations I then had to do in my apartment, was to add a ton of adapters to my solenoid valve in order to make it also garden hose compatible. I know that the amount of adapters can be a bit confusing, but you can find more information about them and this project in the video description. Also do not forget to add sealing tape to all the thread connections to make them truly waterproof. And with the valve finally complete, all that was left for me to do indoors was to extent not only the solenoid wires but also the wires of the water level sensor. Then it was finally time to place the setup next to my greenhouse, guide all the wires into the chest enclosure, also add the push button to it and wire it all up according to the schematic. Then I created a small piece of the garden hose and used that to connect the tap with the valve. Afterwards I laid out the rest of the hose in the greenhouse in the shape of an ellipse, connected that to the other side of the valve and finally drilled the small holes into the hose. And after filling the barrel up with water, it was time for a small test and as you can see it works pretty well. Of course I will have to fine adjust the amount of holes and the distances to one another but I would say that this system is more than sufficient for watering my plants when I am on vacation or something similar. And that ends my greenhouse automation series for me and I hope that I inspired you to maybe try out something similar in the future. As always thanks for watching. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Stay creative and I will see you next time!

Channel: GreatScott!

Views: 222,579

Keywords: watering, system, water, plants, plant, vegetable, fruit, well, diy, do, it, yourself, make, project, your, own, guide, beginner, beginners, arduino, lora, long, range, communication, remote, control, vacation, emergency, solar, battery, 12V, charge, controller, temperature, humidity, greenhouse, automation, automated, window, opener, barrel, rain, pump, hose, garden, solenoid, valve, relay, schematic, code, coding, greatscott, greatscott!, electronics, word, things, network, adapter, level, sensor, electronic, antenna, power, gravity, force, tap

Id: iN6j1AbUbYo

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021