Monitoring Kitchen Herbs & Plants

Problem Statement

Recently my mother hasn’t been able to attend to her plants as she would like and thus other members of the household have been given the responsibility to water the plants, but they never know how much or how little to water them. This device visually notifies them when to water them and reduces their cognitive load along. It also allows anyone to water plants do it regardless of their knowledge of plants. On the other hand, my mother could receive a notification and if she receives continuous notifications she is aware that no one has watered her plant and can personally call one member to do it.

Goal

My proposal provides a soil monitoring system for her herbs/plants the kitchen. The sensors would detect the moisture level in the soil and would turn on a light if the level is lower than it should be (in our case 1000), the light would only be turned off once the right amount of water is given. The light alerts anyone around the area and a text is sent to my mother’s phone. If someone is messing around with a her system and presses the button she gets a phone call letting her know someone is playing around.

Process

1. Got all my pieces together, I was really excited to find a sautered plant sensor in the ideate room.

2. Initially I was mapping one piece to another trying to replicate a project online and not completely understanding what was going on. I was trying to learn by replicating the project and creating a conceptual map of what happens as shown in the diagram.

This posed to be a problem because my declarative knowledge about the equipment I was using, was minimal. This was the first roadblock.

3. My mother always tells me how she is amazed with our ability to search for anything on google. Sometimes she mentions that she just doesn’t know what the correct phrase is to search for. That’s how I felt at this roadblock - I wasn’t using the internet to my advantage. After being shown the amount of information that was available online on each product I was using - I spent time understanding the different components and going through tutorials and starter kits.

4. I ended the day with being able get the analog humidity reading from the sensor on my particle console.

5. I worked on getting the light and the notification the next week, and struggled with the for loop but also partly because my code wasn’t clean I spent time debugging something that was wrong just because there was an extra bracket breaking up the code. I also referenced previous class lab to ensure my light was working correctly.

6. Realizing I only had 2 pieces, I tried working with an LED screen and an awesome joystick button. But was later warned that it may blow up my circuit and thus resorted to using a regular button that did not require any additional power.

Overview

The project took me 6 different steps. Where I encountered a roadblock or needed help I used the internet, labs and help from the TA/instructors. Moving forward I would use the button to switch off the loop - so only if the button is pressed do you get a reading of the plant. Below is the code, diagram, materials need & video of the project.

/*  Soil Mositure Basic Example
    This sketch was written by SparkFun Electronics
    Joel Bartlett
    August 31, 2015

    Basic skecth to print out soil moisture values to the Serial Monitor

    Released under the MIT License(http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
*/


int val = 0; //value for storing moisture value
int soilPin = A0;//Declare a variable for the soil moisture sensor
int soilPower = D7;//Variable for Soil moisture Power
int ledPin = D2;
int buttonPin = D3;
int buttonState = 0;
int previousState = 0;
//Rather than powering the sensor through the 3.3V or 5V pins,
//we'll use a digital pin to power the sensor. This will
//prevent corrosion of the sensor as it sits in the soil.

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);   // open serial over USB
  pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(soilPower, OUTPUT);//Set D7 as an OUTPUT
  digitalWrite(soilPower, LOW);//Set to LOW so no power is flowing through the sensor
  Particle.variable("buttonState", buttonState);

}

void loop()
{
  buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
  digitalWrite(ledPin, buttonState);
  if(buttonState == HIGH && previousState == LOW)
  {
    //do something
    Serial.print("Stop it");
    Particle.publish("stopIt", "HIGH");
  }
    else
    {
      Serial.print("Soil Moisture = ");
      //get soil moisture value from the function below and print it
      Serial.println(readSoil());

      //This 1 second timefrme is used so you can test the sensor and see it change in real-time.
      //For in-plant applications, you will want to take readings much less frequently.
      delay(1000);//take a reading every second
    }

  previousState =  buttonState;

}
//This is a function used to get the soil moisture content
int readSoil()
{

    digitalWrite(soilPower, HIGH);//turn D7 "On"
    delay(1000);//wait 1000 milliseconds
    val = analogRead(soilPin);//Read the SIG value form sensor
    if(val < 1000)
      {
        Particle.publish("soilDry", "HIGH");
        digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);

      }
    else
      {
          digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);


      }

    digitalWrite(soilPower, LOW);//turn D7 "Off"
    return val;//send current moisture value
}

Click to Expand

Materials:

1 SparkFun Soil Moisture Sensor (with Screw Terminals)

1 Mini BreadBoard

1 USB Micro B Cable

1 Particle Photon

Mobile Phone

IFTTT Maker Service: Message and Phone call

6 jumper wires

1 LED

2 Resistors

1 Mini Pushbutton

7 Wires

Plant Savior

Kanika Khosla - https://youtu.be/QkABdENxZ9c

Reflection

To start off I would have read up on each of the parts from the beginning rather than try to imitate and image or video. After knowing about the parts I would have continued to learn by the tutorial, at least the logic would have made more sense to me. I had a bunch of road blocks: not knowing what to search for, not knowing what amount of power would blow up my circuit board, not having clean code, referring to photos without knowing the logic behind it and so on and so forth. That being said, I feel that all the small things have helped in creating a more efficient approach for the next project. This project also has given me a better understanding of the particle board - the difference between 3.3 and 5v along with how ground works. I would love to have been able to water the plant as well maybe with a water balloon pop. It's been a while since I've had the opportunity to tinker, thus this was a great introduction.