Automatically Water Your Garden With Raspberry Pi

According to this project’s blog post, “Going out of town for a weekend can be disastrous for your new plants if the weather is hot and no one is around to water them.” So what’s one to do? Unless you want to resort to something extreme like talking to your neighbors, you automate it, of course — in this case, using a Raspberry Pi!

James’ original idea for watering his garden involved placing control hardware close to it, but after considering the challenges, such as powering it and protecting it from the elements, he opted to place everything inside of his basement.

Water flow is controlled by a 12V DC solenoid, which in turn is controlled by a Raspberry Pi running Linux’s built-in scheduling system known as Cron. Importantly, manual and electronic overrides are also integrated into this system due to a sensible “request” from his better half that anything he automates also needs a manual switch!

No green thumb either? No problem. You can find James’ entire write-up here.