ESP8266 Plant Watering

The Steppers adn the valve I wanted to use arent working together nicely. It needs alot of strength to turn the valve, unfortunetly the steppers turn around themselves when they try to open/close the valve.

For now I continued to improve the general sensor software, this resulted in a nice online graph of the temperature/humidity curve of my plant. The data is collected every 1h hour and gets send every 24h, in between the ESP enters deep sleep for long battery life. The system is not up long enough to say if its realy working or not (4 days by now)

For now the webpage looks like this I use CHAP Links Library and it looks good, also it is very straight forward and simple, it is less then 10 JS lines and you get this result.

While testing around with ESP8266 I found some interesting things. Firat I am using the Arduino IDE amd I want this to me kind of outonomouse, maybe I will add a solar panel later, but my window is heading west so we will see.

I use deepSleep to reduce power, but to wake up I need to reset the chip. THis can be done by connecting IO16 and RESET, but this will also cause the chip to not reset when you want to flash new software (since IO16 is held HIGH while running). I added a diode to block the HIGH to get to the RESET so it only can pull the RESET low and it works like a charm.

Nest the stepper I dont know why but the STepper lib proived does not work by itself. If you make alot of steps it will fail due to a watchdog reset, I also noticed I need to switch the 2 middle pins in the software for the stepper motor to work correctly but this can be an issue with the daypower ones I use (they have 4 controls pins and instead of 1,2,3,4 I needed to use 1,3,2,4). Hence I wrote the code to roatet ste stepper myself and also implemented smooth movement (to achive this I had to #define private public, in order to acsess the delay & modify it)