So I’ve been thinking a lot about automation with my kitchen plants. I don’t like having to remember if they need water all the time. While this burden has been reduced with my Electric Soil Finger I would still prefer if everything took care of itself. Enter automatic watering!
There’s already a lot of different solutions for automatic plant watering, but I all found them lacking in one aspec: You need to use a pump with special diameter tubing.
For a about half a year I’ve had a few tomato plants growing in my window sill. They’ve grown really fast and got so tall I had to tie them up so they wouldn’t fall over. Now I’m about to move and transporting the plants presented a bit of a logistics challenge. Then I figured, if I could just harvest the seeds I could very easily regrow plants when I’ve finished moving.
I’ve just made a small device I can use to get readouts on when to water plants. This works by measuring the conductivity of plant soil. The conductivity changes according to how wet the soil is. This information is read and mapped as servo positions to indicate on a gauge when it’s time to water.
Intro at instructables: Today I’m going to show you how to make your own electric soil finger!
I’ve made a new instructable which can be found here.
The instructable covers how to make a grow light for indoor plants. I made the light because I planted some tomatoes a few months ago, and at this time of the year there’s only about three-four hours of sun in Norway.
It was a lot of soldering, but what I liked the most about the project was the 3D modeling of the light holder which sits on top of the green house.