A DIY IoT project that helps keeping your plant happy - powered by nanoFramework, Preact and Pico.css
Keeping indoor plants can have lots of benefits - they can boost your productivity, improve your mental health or reduce your stress levels. Some even like taking it a step further - and grow their own citrus plants or chillies! But as rewarding as making your very own chilli sauce might be, checking and watering your plant multiple times a day for months can be a challenge.
GrowOne can make this process a whole lot easier: Fill its reservoir with water, put all sensors in place - and do the rest over the included web app. Set up the automatic watering system to keep the soil moisture in range, supervise the temperature, air humidity or reservoir fill level, even configure additional acoustic warnings in case any of the parameters exceed a specific range - allowing you to safely leave your plant for a few days without having to worry.
While the setup of the actual device can vary depending on the specific use-case, it will most likely consist of a water reservoir with a magnetic valve or pump, that is - among the other sensors for determining the soil moisture, air temperature/humidity and reservoir fill level - connected to a microcontroller with WiFi (like the ESP32-WROOM-32).
The software for the microcontroller is written in C# (using nanoFramework). It provides a HTTP REST API and a web app, written in JavaScript (ES11), HTML5 and CSS (using Preact and Pico.css).
GrowOne.UI.demo.mp4
GrowOne can either be deployed directly using the most recent deployment image and nanoff, or compiled and deployed manually from source using the Visual Studio 2022 solution, which requires the nanoFramework extension for Visual Studio. With this extension being installed, the solution can then be opened and either directly executed and debugged (which gives access to useful debug output), or built and deployed to the board.
Please note that, in any case, the WiFi network must be configured on the ESP32. This can be easily done using the nanoFramework extension for Visual Studio - after filling out all the required fields, the WiFi options should be set to "Enable".
Depending on the requirements (and the available parts and budget), the setup of the hardware can vary: Not all supported sensors have to be connected, the irrigation can be done using a pump or a magnetic valve and so on.
The wiki contains a more in-depth description on how to get the software running on your microcontroller and how to connect the supported hardware components with each other.
GrowOne - Copyright (C) 2024 Maximilian Bauer
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
The GrowOne banner and the GrowOne logo (the files "banner.svg", "logo.svg" and "logo.ai") are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.