Vanessa Bradley and Martin Spendiff of VEEB Projects like to take holidays. What they don’t like is the rather awkward task of asking a neighbour to leave their own house and come all the way into their house to water their plants. So they built an automatic plant waterer powered by Raspberry Pi Pico.
I need one of these because I’m a terrible plant-waterer even when I’m not on holiday. I have resigned myself to only keeping cacti at home because I can’t keep anything else alive.
Parts list
- Raspberry Pi Pico
- Waveshare SSD1351 1.5-inch RGB OLED module
- WGCD KY-040 Rotary Encoder
- Capacitive soil moisture sensor
- Relay switch
- Fish tank water pump
How does it work?
Raspberry Pi Pico runs code that constantly monitors the soil moisture levels measured by a sensor. When a reading comes back indicating that the soil is too dry, it triggers a relay switch that adds a squirt of water from the water pump. Another moisture reading is taken, and if the soil is still too dry, more water is added until the sensor is satisfied that the plant has had enough to drink.
The full title of the build is Clive Moss, the Window Box Boss. Yes, really.
As with all of VEEB Projects‘ builds, the code is available for free in their GitHub repo so you can go ahead and save the lives of all your own indoor plants.
Cook burgers with Raspberry Pi Pico
Vanessa and Martin were inspired to do this project after realising that this burger cooking device they’d built around Pico could easily be tweaked to do something more… normal.