A few years ago I decided to make a garden next to a lake so I could use the lake to water the garden. This evolved into the current project that senses the soil and fills a rain barrel when the soil becomes too dry. The sensor data is gathered with an arduino and presented as a prometheus data format. The arduino has an ethernet shield and uses power over ethernet.
Next I used InfluxDB to scrape the arduino page in prometheus data format. There are 3 soil sensors, and a multi-sensor for humidity, pressure, and temperature.
This is a graph of the moisture senors. The higher the value the drier the soil.
The result is a time series graph of the scraped data. There is also a script that averages the three soil sensors and runs a sump pump in the lake for 10 minutes to fill the rain barrel.
I was expecting to use Grafana, but the new InfluxDB graphs are pretty good so I decdied to keep it more simple. The next step is to have the watering script notify InfluxDB that the water is on so that I can compare the moisture level from when the water kicks on. It would be nice to know exactly when it is on and what the delay is from when the moisture sensors begin to see the change.
Here are more pictures of the other sensor graphs:
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| Humidity over time |
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| Pressure over time. |
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| This is the soil sensor I’m using. |
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| This is the temperature/humidity/pressure sensor I’m using. |
The code for this project is located here: Autogarden