Sunday, March 29, 2015

Wateringduino (again)

Though I have posts about wateringduino, I haven't show it on the field, so, here it is:
On top-right I have the TIP120 power circuit to drive the solenoid open/closed when strawberries dry, you can't drive the solenoid directly, it works on 12V, arduino uses 5V and the current it drains (about 800 mA) would blow up the ship even if it used 5V. On the left there's the RTC (Real-Time clock) which supplies the date/time for the logging purposes, with this I know exactly at what time it waters the strawberries and allows a more advanced logger (spreadsheet graphics allowed), as we saw in a previous post. The SD label is an SD shield with a 32 Mb (yes, it's more then enough, and I have to recycle things) microSD card in which the .csv data files are recorded. The "brain" is the arduino circuit, homemade as it gets cheaper than using a bought board, it has (as previous posts refer) 3 circuits only one is working now, just because the other 2 solenoids haven't arrived yet, it will water the trees and blueberries/raspberries/blackberries very soon. The item marked as power-source is as it is, a power-source, which receives 12V DC and generates 2 outputs, one of 5V for arduino and stuff and one of 3.3V for the SD card. IMPORTANT: never try to drive SD cards with 5V, you'll blow them up!
On the left, is a picture of the homemade probe which measures the moist in the soil, the pic was taken a couple weeks ago and the berries are quite bigger now. I must say that the dry-up problem they had last year no longer happens!
I'll get back to this as soon as I get the ordered solenoids, and I'll post the code also, which has changed since the last time, namely the .csv file format as I realized that the old format wasn't graphic friendly, it needed a lot of hammering to get it compliant with the needs.

Cheers!

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