I have an Enviro Grow which is happily monitoring moisture levels for three plants. It was always my intention to get the watering side happening as well, but a lot has happened in life - and I’m just getting back to it.
I can see how to enable watering and connect everything up, and I’ve got a way of fitting a small reservoir in with the plants that should be enough if I’m away for two or three days.
Is there any way that the board can detect if the water level in the reservoir falls to below the level at which the pumps can actually act - if I’m away for long enough for that to happen? The reservoir is fairly small and I can see batteries being run through very quickly if it keeps trying to water when there’s no water to pump.
No, not out of the box. Not that I am aware of anyway. You’d have to fabricate something up. Ultrasonic distance sensor or Time of flight maybe. There are probably easier ways to do it but that’s what came to mind. The Enviro Grow has a QWICC connector for an extra sensor or two. I have two grow setups Pi based Grow Hat Mini here. I have large reservoirs and I’m a not away much if at all these days.
Thanks - I’ll see if there’s something I can link up. I see there are depth sensors available (not at Pimoroni, sadly), but I’ll have to work out whether I can make them talk to the board.
If they have Micro Python support it should be doable. Then just edit the main.py file.
Seeed Studio has an I2C waterlevel sensor: Grove - Water Level Sensor | Seeed Studio Wiki, but they don’t support MicroPython. (Don’t confuse this with their water sensor). Porting their code to MicroPython would certainly be possible.
Otherwise, people have used ultrasonic sensors for this purpose. The waterlevel sensor would be a good solution, it is small and uses I2C, whereas ultrasonic sensors often need 5V and are hard to calibrate.