Arduino Grow Chamber

Took some work (and a chance to sleep on it) but I cobbled together a tiny sketch to get initial calibration data on the sensors that I'll be using. Still fine tuning the data, but for the dirt that I borrowed from the front flower beds, I'll want to keep the value somewhere around 100. Updated information in the instructions!

I got the rest of the wires I was hoping for, and the patience needed to do the detailed soldering (multiple pins when you have shaky hands isn't always fun), but I'm now ready to start wiring up the sensors and test programming!

This was theoretically the most physically difficult part of the build for me, now it's going to be a lot of coding work. Stay Tuned! =^_^=

I finally got the last of the parts I needed a few days ago. Ironically, it was about the most important part, the SD card reader/RTC board. Ironically I'm not going to go too far too fast at this point of development because of two tiny problems:

• My partner took all the computer mice with her on vacation, and I'm too lazy to move the wireless keyboard and mouse to my programming computer across the room. That's okay, she has a warrantee replacement wireless one coming anytime that I'll conscript on her =P
• When I ordered the DuPont lead connectors, I didn't count on how much of a pain it is to crimp them for prototyping. I can do it, but it looks incredibly dirty. A set of male-female breadboard jumper wires will actually do wonderfully for it, and the set I got off of Amazon should arrive on the 24th and comes with a mini breadboard! Yay for streamlining power and ground rails for the moisture sensors

So far, everything with status lights does power up, but I haven't been able to start testing serial commands to make sure that that's all working properly. Hopefully soon I'll make progress there though.

All of the boards and parts (that rats nest in the corner is my jury-rig of the wires connecting the moisture sensors to power, ground and their analog inputs)

From top, clockwise: 4 channel relay board, generic R3 UNO, an ESP-8266 sitting in a right angle connector, and the SD card/RTC shield. The 128 MB card that's currently in it is going to be insane overkill for a lot of the development cycle of this system.

All the parts are shipped now ... should have everything anywhere from Dec 8th and ... Jan 12th ... gonna be a long holiday =P

Had a chance to start getting supplies to begin the prototyping and basic code work. Everything won't get here until late December - mid January, and it's not all the parts, but it's enough to start learning the Arduino IDE and creating all the software. Only totaled out to about $30, and with a couple of wire swaps depending on configuration, I can test up to four soil sensors, and the LEDs on the relay board will simulate the solenoids and light connection. Got everything off of eBay China, and here's the list of what I got:

• Arduino UNO R3: http://www.ebay.com/itm/111705016306
• Data Logger shield: http://www.ebay.com/itm/131176003874
• ESP-01 WiFi module: http://www.ebay.com/itm/191542840815
• 2x4 right angle header: http://www.ebay.com/itm/271560109634
• Arduino 12V power supply: http://www.ebay.com/itm/321901850965
• Soil sensors: http://www.ebay.com/itm/131623541271
• DuPont female connectors: http://www.ebay.com/itm/171199868032
• 4 channel optocoupler relay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/381427778406

Once I have the moisture sensor software itself working, I can easily drop the sensor count to 3 and use the extra relay channel to test the power connections.

Now comes the hard part: waiting for all the bits and pieces to arrive!