Currently I am working on the coating for the foot part of the plant watering sensor. Here I already tried a wide range of techniques and materials. At the moment, epoxy seems the perfect material choice – so I am trying different resins and hardeners to get the best results. Some hardeners are very reactive…
Category: Projects
This category contains all projects.
Plant Watering Sensor Foot Parts from Eurocircuits
I received the foot parts of the plant watering sensor from Eurocircuits. As you can see, they have the same great quality as the head parts. Eurocircuits removes any bridges from the boards in a very clean way, so you get the boards with exactly the shape you designed. This saves a lot of work…
No Success with First Long Term Measurement
The first long term measurement I made, to test the behaviour of the sensor over a longer time range was a failure. After the five days with the device introduced in this post, the readings made absolute no sense. The sensor was not moved in the flower pot and the plant was once watered at…
Plant Watering Sensor – Long Term Logging
To gather more long-term measurements for the capacitive method I use for my plant watering sensor, I created this small logging device. As you can see, it uses one of the plant watering sensor prototypes for the measurements. Instead of using the ATtiny13A on the board, it passes the oscillator signal directly to the microprocessor…
A Versatile ATtiny Programming Adapter
As mentioned in my article about designing a cheap plant watering sensor, I built a small adapter which can be used to pre-program the ATtiny13A. This is necessary, because once soldered on the board, I only have a debugWire interface, which has to be enabled first. The adapter has a small 50mil JTAG header, where…
Plant Watering Sensor – Precise Current Measurement
As I wrote in the first part of my article, how to design a cheap plant watering sensor, I had troubles to get exact measurements of the current, using my Testo multimeter. I searched for a solution and found the µCurrent Gold device, from David L. Jones known for the EEVblog. Later a little bit…
SMD LEDs Tests
Today I tested a number of SMD LEDs for the plant watering sensor project. I soldered all 13 LEDs I shortlisted onto a small board and connected it to an Arduino Zero Pro. So I could try the different flashing styles I planed to use more or less automatically. That way I could focus on the LED flashing itself,…
The Fan Controller Wrapped Up
Yesterday I found some time to put the fan controller in a casing. I used a very cheap no-name case with the dimensions 130 × 68 × 44 mm. First I drilled some 2.5mm holes into the lid, and fastened the Arduino board on it using M2.5 spacers. You see the bottom of the case in the…
The Five Light Spheres Project
I just published the guide for the five light spheres project. It is the perfect decoration for this Winter. The spheres always display a nice color combination and blend from one color to the next. It is a quiet and artful decoration. Continue reading on the project page
Fan Controller Project
Recently I had the problem some expensive components did overheat in my server rack. The ventilation was not optimal and I had to install additional fans. Because this rack is in my office and I like a quiet working place, the ventilation had to be as quiet as possible. First I thought about buying a…