Why we are doing the project?

So, we totally geek out about plants!! We tend to move around a lot, but we often take our plants with us. Some of our locations are better than others, but we are currently living in a big city apartment. This apartment style living has required us to become very innovative to keep the plants alive.

Our biggest issue with our plants is over watering. Inside the apartment water does not evaporate as quickly as it does outside (even with lots of natural light). So I decided to build a system that tracks the moisture levels of the soil and waters when required. I plan on completing this project in multiple different stages, so it should be easy to follow along. I will be posting all of the equipment used as the stages progress.

Starting

The first part of the project is going to calibrating the moisture sensors. The sensor kit is from Amazon and comes with 5 sensors and potentiometers. There are other types of sensors you can buy that don’t have potentiometers, such as these from SparkFun. Like most people, I chose the sensors from Amazon because they were cheap and in bulk. If you would prefer to buy the sensors directly from the vendor (Kuman), they can be found here.