The sys admin's daily grind — PomodoPi

Green Garden

Article from Issue 177/2015
Author(s):

Charly starts the tomato and dill season aboveground with a traffic light and underground with a soaker hose, along with assistance from two gardeners and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi board.

Truth be told, I have ignored my garden for the past 15 years. This year, however, I set myself the task of growing my own tomatoes and herbs, and I wrote on Twitter about possible technical support for my green thumb. This was duly noted by gardeners Vanessa Giese and Pia Reichert in their blog [1]. Shortly thereafter, I was a guest author for the "Garden Nerds" column.

My first step was to plan automatic irrigation. My daily bread as a sys admin is to automate routine tasks with bits of technology, so I searched and found a soldering iron and tied a capacitive humidity sensor up to an A/D convertor using a Raspberry Pi. This setup provides me with data about the soil moisture in the plant pot every minute [2].

My Raspberry-to-garden adapter forms the second phase: I have a short hose running from the faucet in the garden to a solenoid valve. While the Raspberry Pi has 12 volts at its terminals, it lets water through, which flows into a perforated hose that I have looped through my raised bed. The tomatoes will put down roots there as soon as the danger of frost is over. When I wrote this article, however, they were enjoying their winter quarters in my living room (Figure 1).

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