If you wanted to do an automated watering setup with a soil sensor, it’s not hard to do with my software.
Basically, you’d need a cheap raspberry pi ($15), a Govee bluetooth power outlet ($20), a Xiaomi Flower-Care bluetooth soil sensor ($25), and a genereic aquarium pump ($15). Cheap and easy.
Here’s a post over at my potnanny info in another thread.
Basically, you’d:
- Put the soil sensor into one of the pots.
- Put the aquarium pump into your nutrient/water bucket, and plug it into the govee bluetooth power outlet.
- install and set up the software
- discover the bluetooth devices
- set up a “smart control” for the power outlet (controlling the aquarium pump), that says “when the soil-moisture reading from Xiaomi Flower-Care is below 10%, turn the pump on for 30 seconds” Then, anytime the moisture is low, it will run the irrigation. whether that is once per week, or several times per day.