Automating The Greenhouse
If gardening is your passion, letting the plants die breaks you down. Especially when you buy seeds and not plants. You spend time and take extra care in germinating the seeds to begin with. While germinating is a hard process, keeping the young saplings alive is yet another major task. The job isn’t done yet if you do not make them grow and produce the yield. And every phase makes you feel that the previous phase was a little easy. Yet, you don’t give, if its your passion. Do you?
I felt really bad when I let the plants die in the first year of gardening in the UK. In my previous post, I mentioned about the miniature greenhouse that I built. I brought that into my conservatory. The conservatory being very cold during the winters, did not let the help a lot. So, the plan is to keep a heater inside this greenhouse.
I did move a oil-filled heater inside the greenhouse and then connected the heater to a smart plug. I was able to connect this smart plug to the home network and I was able to switch on the heater remotely, from my couch. I also put a digital thermometer inside the greenhouse to monitor the temperature and switched the heater off. But this doesn’t help. I cannot monitor the temperature during the nights when it is most needed. Also, this smart switch came with its own set of problems. That is when I recalled this, Oh yeah, I do have an engineering degree
Long story short, I built a smart thermostat using a microcontroller and a relay. And this thermostat was programmed to switch the heater ON when the temperature falls below a threshold and switched OFF the heater when it’s not required. I also had a manual override to switch ON the heater whenever required too. This solved the issues with winter and that is when I was able to move my plants inside the greenhouse. I will post in detail on how to build one sometime later.
There were plans to have LED lights which can work as grow-lights. I was also thinking to automate the water sprinkling mechanism - maybe someother day.