Alright, let me walk you through setting up my little project, the one I call my t22 farms thing. It wasn’t anything too complicated, just something I wanted to try out.
Getting Started
So, first off, I had this idea buzzing around in my head for a bit. I’ve got a few plants kicking around the house, and honestly, I’m not the best at remembering to check on them. I figured, maybe I could rig something up to keep tabs on them for me. Nothing fancy, just the basics.
I started by digging through my boxes of old tech stuff. Found an old Raspberry Pi, I think it’s a Model 3B, just sitting there collecting dust. Perfect. Then I hopped online and ordered a few bits and pieces. Needed some sensors, you know?
- Got a couple of those simple soil moisture sensors. The cheap ones with the two prongs.
- Picked up a temperature and humidity sensor too, a DHT11 type. Again, nothing high-end.
- Grabbed a bunch of jumper wires. Always need more wires.
Putting it Together
Next step was actually connecting everything. Spent a good chunk of an afternoon plugging those little wires into the Pi’s GPIO pins and connecting them to the sensors. It took a bit of fiddling, I had to look up the pinout diagram a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t plugging things in wrong. I definitely put a wire in the wrong spot once or twice, but no harm done.
Once the hardware seemed okay, I needed to get the software side working. I decided to use Python for this. Seemed like the most straightforward way to handle the sensors on the Pi. I installed the necessary libraries – there are plenty of guides out there for the DHT11 and those soil sensors. Then I wrote a pretty basic script.
The script essentially does this:
- Wakes up every, let’s say, 15 minutes.
- Reads the value from the temperature/humidity sensor.
- Reads the values from the two soil moisture sensors.
- At first, I just had it print the readings straight to the screen. Super simple.
Making it Useful
Just printing wasn’t that helpful long-term, so I tweaked the script. Made it write the readings, along with the date and time, to a plain text file. Each new reading just gets added to the end of the file. That way, I had a log.
Then I set the whole thing up near my plants. Stuck the moisture sensor prongs into the soil of two different pots. Let the temperature sensor just hang nearby. Found an old phone charger to power the Pi, plugged it in, and set the script to run automatically when the Pi started up.
The Result
And that was pretty much it. I let it run for about a week. It was actually kind of cool checking the log file each day. I could see how the soil moisture dropped over time, and it definitely reminded me when it was time to water them. Way better than my usual guesswork. Also saw how the temperature and humidity fluctuated in that corner of the room.
So, yeah, that’s the story of my little t22 farms setup. It’s basic, nothing revolutionary, but it does exactly what I wanted it to do: keeps a simple eye on my plants. Maybe down the road, I’ll add more sensors or figure out a way to view the data online easily. But for now, it just sits there, quietly logging away. Job done.
