SmartPlantPi – RaspberryPi Based Watering Kit – Advanced Manual Released

SwitchDoc Labs is pleased to announce the release of the Advanced Features Manual for SmartPlantPi, the first Raspberry Pi based No Soldering Plant Monitoring and Watering Kit.  It is available on the SmartPlantPi product page.

What is SmartPlantPi?

SmartPlantPi (or Smart Plant for short) is an introductory, easy to build Raspberry Pi based environmental monitoring and plant watering system using advanced sensors to monitor the soil moisture, monitor the sunlight, watch the air quality and monitor temperature and humidity.

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What is in this Manual?

This manual shows how to hook your SmartPlantPi up to an Internet IOT Dashboard.   The manual is available here on the SmartPlantPi product page.   It uses MQTT to talk to the PubNub broker and from there to the freeboard.io Internet Dashboard.

The SmartPlant software comes preconfigured to display your Plant on the Internet (for all to see it in it’s glory!) using an IOT dashboard.   This is done by using Pubhub and Freeboard (both in Free mode!) to display all the information.

Want to see the Live Link to our Smart Plant? Click here. It will take about 15 seconds to refresh.

Open Source Software!  Change it to your liking!

Smart Plant comes will all the source code and instructions for installing it on your Raspberry Pi.   You can learn from the Pure Python code, customize it, add more plants and sensors.   It’s a major part of the learning process for the Raspberry Pi and Smart Plant.  Not to mention having your own IOT device!

 

The Science Behind The Project

Our beloved (most of the time) CTO, Dr. John Shovic, always insists on putting in something about the theory behind the project. Here are his thoughts.

This was a great project to design and build.   It was really an interesting process learning about the sensors, how to interconnect them and then learning about flow meters, USB Pumps and especially the software bringing them all together.

Where is the science and engineering in this project?  All through it from the bottom to the top. I could go through the entire system, but that will have to wait.  The most interesting points?   One, we are using feedback in the system.  Negative feedback to be exact.    We aren’t just watering on a timer, we are looking at the soil moisture and if it is high enough, we don’t water.  We don’t water unless we need to.   Very cool.

Secondly, the sensors we have in this project are amazing.   For example, the Air Quality sensor is very, very sensitive.   We can detect hairspray from 50 feet away.

Thirdly, I got a lot out of learning how to display the data from Smart Plant on the Freeboard IOT Dashboard and I had a lot of fun designing the Alexa app, although they made me take out all the cool statements. Such as  asking Smart Plant “who is the coolest person you know?”. The answer to that was obvious to me, but since it was debatable, we removed it.

What is Next for SmartPlantPi?

We will be building a REST interface so you can collect the data from other connected servers on demand.  We are also looking at adding SmartPlantPi to our DataLogger.  Makes tracking the AirQuality a lot easier!