Building a watering can with an arduino and an aquarium pump
The motivation: At our workplace, there is a room full of smart people. Everyone has a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering and most of us are doing a PhD in mechanical engineerning – So on paper we should be pretty smart. Yet still, our collective brainpower is not able to remember to water the office plants at least once a week. There could be the easy way out to just set a fixed date on the smartphone to set off an alarm when to water the plants. As we are hugely talented in procrastinating, we went for a different approach. Why not use an Arduino and an aquarium pump to water the plants automatically? Welcome to the utopia of lazy PhD students! The hardware requirements: The parts list depends on how sophisticated you want the plant watering system to be. You could just have a DS1307 RTC i2C module that tells you the time and similar to the advent wreath project you pick a certain time when the pump has to be activated. The pump itself usually requires more power t...