Automation part 1
I have recently been getting into Home Assistant which is a free and open source software that allows for home automation of smart devices. Recently, I thought about using this to help automate the care of my plants when I go on vacation or for creating specific environments that would be too hard to maintain by hand. My first purchases were:
- A mini PC to host Home Assistant
- Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle (allows use of Zigbee devices)
- Tiny Zigbee temperature & humidity sensor which was only about $5 (so I ordered 3 of them)
- Zigbee soil temperature & humidity sensor
- Two different drip irrigation systems to try (programmable no wifi & WD-01ADE)
- Govee smart humidifier H7140
- A handful of WiFi smart outlets to control fans and grow lights
I currently have the humidifier, a couple grow lights, and a fan in my outdoor mini greenhouse. I've been messing around with it to see how well I can control the environment and have had no problem keeping the humidity within a set target. I turned on the automation at midnight on August 12th and you can see that the humidity has been stable between 75%-85%. I basically have an automation which turns on the humidifier whenever the humidity sensor detects that the humidity is below 75% and back off when it is above 85%. This type of control loop is often referred to as bang-bang. In the future, I may experiment with other control loops since the humidifier can be set to 10 different levels but for now this seems to be working quite well.
I expect to have a much bigger challenge with the temperature as the walls of my greenhouse are very thin clear plastic. I have read that you can use bubble wrap or some sort of insulation on the walls to help with this as well as putting a large water reservoir inside to trap heat and slowly release it over night. You can see in the image below that the temperature varies quite a bit getting above 100F in the day and dropping down to nearly 60F at night. In the winter months, it will likely get below 40F which will be unsuitable for some plants.
I just received one of the irrigation systems (the one with WiFi, WD-01ADE). I got it setup and so far I am really happy with it. The device can be added to the Tuya app which has a very good Home Assistant integration. I was pretty surprised at how plug and play the device was. Once it was in the app, I could turn on/off each of the pumps as well as set up automations from Home Assistant.
I used pump 1 for the plants in larger pots like the tomatos and peppers and then pump 2 for the smaller plants and bonsai trees.
I am still waiting for the second irrigation system to arrive and when it does, I will update this post with more details.