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Plantduino Greenhouse Cares Of Your Plants While You’re Away

Davide GombaJuly 4th, 2011

Nice step-by-step guide to lets you set up a project that taked care of your field while you’re away:

This summer I wanted to combine my two loves of plant science and engineering. Thus I am constructing my very own greenhouse in my backyard. I am an undergrad, and as any former student knows, this means I move around constantly, and I am not always around to take care of my vegetable garden. I love my plants but since I am moving back to school in July, and my family is unreliable, I need a way to make sure that they are taken care of. Enter Arduino!

I have constructed an automated watering and temperature system. This includes sensors that will turn the systems on only when needed. This is essential when the ever-changing New England weather demands some intelligence in watering and heating patterns.

I want to document this project on Revolt Lab so that anyone who is also in love with vascular (or nonvascular) plants can join me and we can nerd out together! This is my first project using an Arduino so I am using wonderful articles from MAKE and Instructables as very helpful templates. Already the Instructables, MAKE, and Ladyada blogs have been ridiculously helpful so, worry not biology nerds, you too can show the engineers just how awesome we are!

via [instructables] source [RevoltLab]

3 Responses to “Plantduino Greenhouse Cares Of Your Plants While You’re Away”

  1. Bruno Says:

    Hi, I am doing some research on tomato irrigation and it is actually simmilar to the thing you are propossing here. We use a different kind of datalogger/actuator (Campbell Scientific, CR10X instead of an arduino), and the plot is a bit bigger (around 1000 m2). In the study we’ve found that for sandy to sand-loamy soils watermarks (around 40$ from Irrometer, CA (USA)) work well maintaining a soil moisture target -establish at -25 Cb soil water tension-, I will try to provide a link to the article we’ve written with the experimental data gathered. These kind of sensors would allow to control soil moisture better, but that it is based on the pre-conceived idea that nails are a nice but a bit inexact solution, which maybe is not the case 🙂

  2. d.gomba@arduino.cc Says:

    wow Bruno.
    I wait for the link.

    Thanks for commenting,
    Davide

  3. Arno Jansen Says:

    Hi!

    Great read, thanks. There are actually many projects like this around and it is great to see what people are doing with gardening and easy access to technology.

    I am doing a similar project where I monitor and control a greenhouse via 2 arduino’s and XBee radio’s. And the data is logged to various services like pachube.com. The greenhouse is powered off-grid by solar and batteries. Once I figure out how to get my power usage down and cleanup the code, I will open up everything as well. It’s good the share the knowledge!

    Thanks for sharing!
    Arno Jansen

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