Collaborate Disseminate
Change on industrial scales is slow, but if you’re operating your own small farm or simply working in a home garden there are some excellent ways to use water more …read more Continue reading 2022 Hackaday Prize: Plant Monitoring System Grows To Include LoRa
Caring for a few plants, or even an entire farm, can be quite a rewarding experience. Watching something grow under and then (optionally) produce food is a great hobby or …read more Continue reading All-In-One Automated Plant Care
While the impulse to solving problems in complex systems is often to grab a microcontroller and some sensors to automate the problem away, interfacing with the real world is often …read more Continue reading Occam’s Razor: Gardening Edition
Keeping soil moist is key to keeping most plants happy. It can be a pain having to dip one’s fingers into dirty soil on the regular, so it’s desirable to …read more Continue reading Check Soil Moisture At A Glance With This Useful Display
One of [Sasa]’s life goals is to be able to sit back in his home and watch as robots perform all of his work for him. In order to work …read more Continue reading Your Plants Can Take Care of Themselves Now
The realities of wearing a mask when you go out, from forgetting the thing in the car to dealing with fogged up glasses, have certainly taken some getting used to for most of us. But not every issue is immediately obvious. For example, experts say that as a mask gets …read more
From the windtraps and stillsuits of Dune’s Arrakis, to the moisture vaporators of Tatooine, science fiction has invented fantastic ways to collect the water necessary for life on desert worlds. On Earth we generally have an easier go of it, but water supply in arid climates is still an important issue. Addressing this obstacle, a team of researchers from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a method to tease moisture out of thin air.
A year after the team first published their idea, they have successfully field-tested their method on an Arizona State University rooftop in …read more
Gardening is a rewarding endeavour, and easily automated for the maker with a green thumb. With simplicity at its focus, Hackaday.io user [MEGA DAS] has whipped up a automated planter to provide the things plants crave: water, air, and light.
[MEGA DAS] is using a TE215 moisture sensor to keep an eye on how thirsty the plant may be, a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor to check the airflow around the plant, and a BH1750FVI light sensor for its obvious purpose. To deliver on these needs, a 12V DC water pump and a small reservoir will keep things right as …read more
If you compulsively search online for inexpensive microcontroller add-ons, you will see soil moisture measurement kits. [aka] built a greenhouse with a host of hacked hardware including lights and automatic watering. What caught our attention among all these was Step 5 in their instructions where [aka] explains why the cheap soil sensing probes aren’t worth their weight in potting soil. Even worse, they may leave vacationers with a mistaken sense of security over their unattended plants.
The sensing stakes, which come with a small amplifier, work splendidly out of the box, but if you recall, passing current through electrodes via …read more
Continue reading Sensing Soil Moisture: You’re Doing it Wrong!
With almost 8 billion souls to feed and a changing climate to deal with, there’s never been a better time to field a meaningful “Internet of Agriculture.” But the expansive fields that make industrial-scale agriculture feasible work against the deployment of sensors and actuators because of a lack of infrastructure to power and connect everything. So a low-power radio network for soil moisture sensors is certainly a welcome development.
We can think of a lot of ways that sensors could be powered in the field. Solar comes to mind, since good exposure to the sun is usually a prerequisite for …read more
Continue reading Using Backscatter Radio for a Soil Sensor Network