One easy way to get started on the home automation front is with something that makes a house a home in the first place — lush, green plants. As nice as it is to have them around, it can be difficult to care (or remember to care) for them all the time.
Plantpal makes easy work of that, with an e-paper display that makes it plain as day how your plant is feeling. As you might expect, it features a soil moisture sensor, but what might be unexpected is that it’s capacitive instead of the usual resistive type. This way, no traces are exposed to the elements of plant life. It also has a BME688 sensor to monitor air quality and CO₂, so your plant has the chance to thrive.
Around back you’ll find an ESP32-C6, an AEM10941 for solar energy harvesting, and another set of solar panels. Be sure to check out the project’s GitHub if you want to learn more about this adorable and useful device.
Is there any plan to make this available for sale assembled and ready to plant?
This looks perfect for a large indoor garden, ie. Lots of plants in pots.
it would cost like 100 bucks a piece judging by the hardware used
I want like 20…
There has not been a good scalable one yet, that I can find.
How does this qualify as automation?
I see no valve control for automatic watering control.
I don’t even see remote data access so watering could be controlled by something else.
Because they used an adafruit esp-32 you could connect it to adafruit IO
Really? Because they used [company name] Wifi capable chip, they can connect to [company name] cloud platform?
Sorry bout that. But I’d assume that since it has wifi, it’s pretty trivial to connect to any automation setup that has network capability. Or not connect to anything specific, they could monitor themselves and take action when needed.
Interesting project, might be interesting if it’s possible to poll the amount of incoming current as an ad-hoc light sensor. Might build this myself! :)