ESP8266: Meet Thirsdee, the Intelligent Plant Helper!

It’s amazing what you can do with just a few components: a load cell, a high gain analog-to-digtal converter and a NodeMCU module. You can for instance measure the water consumption of your dear plants. If you combine the previous mentioned components with a OLED display you can even visualize the current water level in the plant pot. And if the level reaches a critical low you can have it send an alarm message to your cellphone. Now connect everything and give it a name: Thirsdee is born!

Thirsdee showing the current amount of water stored in the
pot and the plant.
Thirsdee’s complete setup from left to right:
XIAOMI 10400mAh Power Back, OLED display, HX711 ADC,
NodeMCU V1.0, Load Cell with Acryl plates and of course: the plant
Oh no! Thirsdee is out Water…

One problem is the calibration. How do you know how what the “full” weight of the plant plus pot is, how about the empty wait. Of course, you could wait until the plant turns to dust but then it might be too late to water it;-).

Update: 3D printed casing arrived!

Read more about the casing here…

Code

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Posted by Daniel Eichhorn

Daniel Eichhorn is a software engineer and an enthusiastic maker. He loves working on projects related to the Internet of Things, electronics, and embedded software. He owns two 3D printers: a Creality Ender 3 V2 and an Elegoo Mars 3. In 2018, he co-founded ThingPulse along with Marcel Stör. Together, they develop IoT hardware and distribute it to various locations around the world.

9 comments

  1. Hi,
    I see you use a Xiaomi Battery Pack for this project, how can you manage that ? I have try with exactly the same Battery Pack, and the consumption was that small that the battery just stop after few seconds.

    • That's it, the battery goes sleep due to low consumption. These batteries have an auto shut down to avoid your mobile overheat.

      I have bought my batteries (two of them) on banggood, just by security, I have check on mi.com their serial and they are legit.

      I have check the setup with a nodemcu v0.9 and a nodemcu v1.0, that's the same, with the oled on directly, that's the same. I will make some test with some 'active loop' to raise the consumption of the system (just to know when the battery considers it's too low).

  2. Hi Dani, nice project. What I was wondering is whether the weight gain of the plant isn't disturbing the water measurement too much. Or does the plant grow so slowly compared to water usage/evaporation that this isn't significant?

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