Mostly Working Buckaroo Garden Bed Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

[mnopneal]

The microbit controlled watering system seems to be somewhat working. Pictures include the first 7 versions of the watering manifold. None of which really worked right. Turns out the eighth time really is the charm. Custom Design is available on request.

The important part was making the input pipe an Out-ey instead of an In-ey to reduce constriction.

Hook up some solar panels and batteries and it's ready for regular use.

Had to use 950 as the threshold.

[mikeysklar]

Cool project. Look great. I too find that the 8th time is charm for anything involving water.

If you are so inclined post the STLs here for those sweet little manifolds or a link to any STL share site (thingiverse/stlfinder/etc.).

[mnopneal]

Hmmm. The manifold was done in TinkerCad. This AdaFruit forum site says "The extension stl is not allowed." I can email that on request.

We are also starting to work on hacking the guts of a Solar light fixture to power it indefinitely. This may involve a small relay or MosFet transistor to support more pump.

[mikeysklar]

@mnopneal,

I use tinkercad too. I love their iPad app. Probably the best way to post these things would be through thingiverse or yeggi and just links to the STL website from this forum.

If you have not already tried our relays and pumps they might work well with your setup as we do sell latching which is important for low power applications like this running off small PV.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2923
https://www.adafruit.com/?q=pump&sort=BestMatch

Good luck with this project. It looks like a lot of fun.

[mnopneal]

We now have cleaned up the cabling and have interfaced a hacked up Gama Sonic solar panel and Battery assembly.

Using a 4 pin connector we can leave the sensors in the soil; each time we moved them we had to figure out a different threshold.

I think the pump actually runs a bit better on the 3.3 volts it's getting off the solar panel batteries. We may look to see if we can run 6 pipes instead of 4 at the manifold.

I revised the original code a bit:
https://makecode.microbit.org/_0xpPFFUh9aA1

Pressing A reduces the threshold by 10; Pressing B increases it.
Each time through the loop it shows the count of the number of times it has cycled the pump since startup.
After sampling, it shows the numeric value; in my case the graph wasn't useful.

If below threshold it shows a frown, and plays a Dm chord, cycles the pump, and then turns off the display.

If above threshold it shows a smile, then blanks the display.