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pi_plant

pi_plant screenshot

Overview

(Long) weekend project to monitor and water my plant with a Raspberry Pi. The app was developed for Raspbian Wheezy with an arduino two-prong soil moisture sensor via a MCP3002 analog-to-digital converter, and an arduino relay board to control a 110 VAC water pump.

It makes a couple of assumptions:

Moisture Sensor:

  • Now includes a Kicad PCB design for interfacing with a MCP3002 10-bit SPI Analog-to-Digital Converter. The Pi talks to the ADC via its SPI interface. Includes all the manufacturing files required to fab the board (which I had OSH Park make for me for $7.85 shipped, which required about $15 in components from Digi-key.)

    Custom PCB Layout

  • Includes three 2N3904 transistors to allow the Pi to control the power provided to the MCP3002 & the two analog sensors:

    NPN-Transistor Network

(Leaving these two-prong type of sensors powered on 24/7 can lead to galvanic corrosion, so it's probably better to turn them on when needed.)

  • Provides two analog measurement channels. Also supplies VCC & GND (in case the moisture sensor requires it) for each.

Water Pump:

  • Assumes there is a power pin to activate the pump. My Pi's 3.3V GPIO was able to activate/deactivate my relay board directly, but if you're having issues you could always use a NPN-transistor network as shown above.

Dependencies

pi_plant was developed on Ruby v2.1 and Rails v4.0. Several gems were utilized to make development easier:

gem 'bootstrap-sass', github: 'thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass'
gem 'figaro'
gem 'draper'
gem 'lazy_high_charts'

Installation

  1. Clone the repository.

  2. Create a /config/application.yml file with environmental variables holding all your secret keys (see figaro's documentation for more details) and add it to your .gitignore file.

    RAILS_SECRET_KEY_BASE: '<rails secret key>'

  3. Schedule the sample rake task to take periodic soil measurements.

    crontab -e
00 00, 12, * * * * rvmsudo rake RAILS_ENV=production sample

    Note: the Pi requires root access to interact with hardware

  4. Start the webserver

  5. Create a plant with the GPIO pins used in your circuit.

Bill of Materials

Find No. Qty Part Number Description Approx. Extended Cost
1 1 756-8308 Raspberry Pi v2 $40
2 1 SDC10/8GBET Kingston 8GB microSD Card $8
3 1 EW-7811Un Edimax 802.11n USB Adapter $10
4 1 B00E0NTPP4 SunFounder 2 Channel 5V Relay Shield for Arduino $7
5 1 B00AYCNEKW sunkee Soil Moisture Sensor $3
6 1 B001BOD9JI TOM 3.5gph Aquarium Pump $16
7 1 kTJJCOss OSH Park Custom PCB $8
8 1 MCP3002-I/P MCP3002 2-Channel 10-bit ADC $2
9 3 2N3904BU 40V NPN Transistor $1
10 3 CF14JT1K00 1kOhm 1/4W Carbon Through Hole Resistor $1
11 2 0022288363 Molex 36pos Right-Angle Pin Header $4

TODO

  • Custom PCB for interfacing with the MCP3002 (experimenting with Kicad)

Keywords

  • Raspberry Pi
  • RPi
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Kicad
  • MCP3002
  • Home Automation

Credits

pi_plant is the product of Ryan Ringler. It was developed as a (long) weekend project to experiment with the Raspberry Pi, Rails, and Kicad.

License

pi_plant is licensed under the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for additional details.