The objective of this project is to help people who love farming and gardening to monitor their plants at home. Lots of gardeners do not know whether their plants have been supplied with sufficient water, light, and fertilizer for a healthy growth. Every day, they just guessing the amount of water their plants need, without knowing either is sufficient or not. In order to overcome this, most of the gardener will be overwatering their plants, this will make waste of water. Make thing more worst is when they are busy with their job or have to go for a vacation.
This project provides a solution by developing a smart vase that can monitor conditions of the plants and ensure sufficient water supplied. This product monitor conditions of the plants by using sensors that embedded in the smart vase. Three sensors are included in the developed smart vase: DHT 11 sensor that will monitor surrounding temperature and humidity, LDR sensor module that will monitor light intensity surrounding the plants and lastly soil moisture sensor that will measure the moisture of the soil of the smart vase.
The most interesting part of this product is the capability to ensure sufficient amount of water required by the plants and avoid water being wasted. When the soil humidity is low, the smart vase will be watering the plant. However, when the soil humidity is high, the smart vase will stop watering the plant. In order to achieve it, an intelligent watering mechanism is designed and included in the product. Because of this, the smart vase includes a water pump and a reservoir in its design. All the sensors and the water pump are connected to Arduino Uno, which is selected as the microcontroller. This product also has wifi capability that allows sensor reading to be pushed to the Favoriot platform. The smart vase will be used with an android app for the gardener to keep track of their plant’s condition and assess accordingly.
To evaluate and optimise the performance of the smart vase, few experimental works will be conducted and feedback from the Agriculture Department will be taken into consideration during the design. We believe that this smart vase will be in every house helping the gardener taking care of their loved plants.
[NOTE: This project is being done by UTHM, our FAVORIOT’s University’s collaborator. Article by: Muhammad Hilmi Husaini bin Mohd Nizam]