Home Assistant controlled Terrace Garden Irrigator ( v.2021)

Overview

This project was created in the year 2021, to overcome 2 major challenges:

• My negligence to water the plants whenever necessary and prevent those from drying up.
• To curb pigeon menace, which used to pluck the saplings and buds.

Solution for my Negligence

This was the most unnecessarily complex, yet sensible & niche solution to my problems, which could be done with few bucks and instant implementation on my terrace. Also, this project could be automated using an analog soil moisture sensor, but that iteration lacks the manual intervention. So, I had 2 options lying ahead of me:

• Control the process through a dedicated app like Blynk.
• Ask my google home to get the task done, where my home assistant reminds me every evening to water the plants.

I chose the latter mode, as it was very convenient to me as well as my family, as anyone can invoke the assistant to get the task done. Again, sensible yet niche solution, where it doesn't completely cut us out from intervening plants and monitoring their health, where this frequency is cut down 2 folds.

Pigeon Menace Problem

I wanted a harmless, yet an effective and sensible solution to shoo away the pigeons from plucking and damaging my saplings. Covering up my entire terrace was the most effective and not so pocket friendly solution. So, I came up with a small jet spray mechanism, which sprays the water on the pigeons when they land on the periphery of the pots. This iteration just uses the basic ultrasound sensor, as I wasn't aware of image processing back then and I even lacked components.

Putting it all together...

For this project, I made use of a classic Arduino Uno, an L298N motor driver for the 5.0V submersible pumps, Bolt IoT module, which sports ESP8266 WiFi & BLE module on it and a 9.0V power source.

I used IFTTT platform for Webhooks services, to connect my ESP8266 module (Bolt IoT) with my Google Home.

This image shows us that, the Google Cloud Server orchestrates the irrigation system with the help of Webhooks service available on IFTTT.

Make sure that you use the same WiFi SSID for all the devices.

I guess, this sums up my project story... happy tinkering

Checklist for publication*****************************************************************************************