The quality of air is receiving increasing attention from society, and potted plants are becoming more popular in offices and home life. They can purify the air and improve people’s mood, alleviating work stress. However, in today’s fast-paced society, the automation of potted plant care management has significant market application prospects.
In the general course “Open Source Hardware and Maker”, we learned to use and debug modules such as blink, button, LED, light, and temperature. After mastering the Arduino development platform and some hardware modules, we planned to design a smart flower pot that can automatically measure the current temperature and humidity, water the plants, and monitor them through an APP in the cloud.
1. System Composition
Using 3-D printing technology, we designed a suitable smart flower pot. The structure of the pot is shown in the figure:
2. Hardware Design
We used the ESP8266-NodeMCU development board to set up the Arduino IDE development environment. Other hardware includes the SHT31 temperature and humidity sensor (to measure the environmental air temperature and humidity), the XYC-PT3E5 light sensor (to measure the current light intensity and convert the light signal to an electrical signal output), the RS660 soil moisture sensor (to measure the relative humidity in the soil and transmit it to the display), the YF208 water flow sensor, and a matching 5V water pump (to implement automatic watering based on the temperature and humidity we debugged, combined with previous output results). The SHT31 outputs a digital signal, which connects to the main control via a bus. The light-sensitive resistor is a resistance value, converted into an analog voltage signal through signal conditioning. The soil moisture sensor uses the principle of electromagnetic pulses to measure the apparent dielectric constant of the soil based on the propagation frequency of electromagnetic waves in the medium, thus obtaining the volumetric water content of the soil, which is converted into a digital signal and connected to the main control through the main line.
The overall hardware block diagram is as follows:
3. Experiment Summary
During our system debugging process, we used the examples provided in the toolbox of the Arduino platform and the demonstration code given by our instructor to basically solve the measurement of parameters such as temperature and humidity, light intensity, etc. Meanwhile, as the project neared completion, we felt a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. However, the problem we encountered was how to upload relevant data to the APP and how to water the plants based on the suitable temperature and humidity for the current season to avoid counterproductive effects. Later, we gradually thought of Arduino as an excellent open-source platform, and we gained inspiration from the codes of online bloggers, finding methods to develop the upload to APP, and downloaded the cloud plant database to help determine whether watering is needed.
The results are shown in the figure:
Table 1 System Measurement Data
Figure 1 APP Display Curve
Figure 2 System Field Experiment and Display Interface
From our measurement results, the measurement breadth is in place, but the accuracy still needs improvement. Meanwhile, the APP’s development level is relatively rudimentary, with significant room for enhancement. In summary, in this general course, we experienced the joy of transforming knowledge into practical benefits and gained satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, and the joy of learning.
Group Members:
She Dongliang 202083360026 Disaster Prevention Engineering
Yu Huizhi 202083360021 Disaster Prevention Engineering
Duan Rui 202083250054 Big Data
Instructor: Xu Wei
Text Editor: She Dongliang (Freshman)
Image Provided: She Dongliang
Beautification Editor: Cheng Hongliu Wang Yingying
Editor: Chen Xueming
