One trait I picked up from my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents growing up was the need to keep plants. I was surrounded with them at home, at their homes, my great aunt even had a flower shop. After school growing up I’d walk over and hang out, my mom would work part time to help out. Long story short, there were a lot of plants and flowers in my life and I’ve kept it going.
Currently in my apartment, there are no less than 40 potted plants. This is even after giving away plants at every turn, seven the other weekend to my brother and his brother-in-law. Each time I prune, I’ll see if I can propagate, then pass them along once they’re established. It’s a good hobby, and I like the idea of passing my enthusiasm for horticulture on others.
In any case, having so many plants strewn about the apartment, in so many varieties, and each room having different light and temperature environments, I have to keep checking on them throughout the week. Now since I’d like to work on some personal projects in data and charting on the web, I thought I’d generate some data through this site and through some Pi projects!
With supply constraints, it’s a major pain to get a RaspberryPi right now. I was unsuccessful in casually searching, then I gave in and bought a ‘kit’ filled with extra goodies like a case, micro sd card, cables and adapters. I figured it was acceptable to spend a little more, even if I didn’t use all the components right now, I could use them in future projects.
I ended up with a Raspberry Pi 4 kit from CanaKit. Now that I’ve got my Pi, I started to do some research on similar projects from the community. After reading a half dozen projects, I ended up settling on some easy to find and relatively inexpensive components for capacitive moisture sensors from SwitchDoc Labs. These aren’t the most accurate option out there, just good enough for the task at hand.
Now that I’ve ordered my gear, first phase will be testing the sensors and getting acquainted with the data. My end goal will be to have all four sensors reporting moisture levels at about 30 minute intervals, feeding that data into a database, and charting the data to get some practice with Gatsby chart plugins!
