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Raspberry Pi Smart Vertical Farming Takes Veggies to New Heights
When it comes to making dumb devices smart, there’s no board quite as capable as the Raspberry Pi. From its convenient design to huge online community, it’s no surprise that maker Tanay Tanay chose the Pi 4 as a go-to controller from their smart vertical farming system. This project is designed to help users manage their vertical gardens for optimal results.
According to Tanay, the idea was to create a smart system from scratch that would enable a variety of useful farming features. Tanay wanted things like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support for remotely monitoring the plants. Automating routine procedures like watering can be done with great precision when the moisture levels are tracked with a sensor.
The end result is a Pi-powered system with tons of cool goodies to take your plant care to the next level. Tanay is able to monitor all sorts of environmental factors like how much light is available, how moist the air is, how much water is in the soil, what the temperature is and much more. The icing on the cake is a user-friendly interface that can be used to manually water the plants.
The main board for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4 B. It’s connected to an Arduino Nano R3 which is assigned to a specific plant. Some of the sensors confirmed in the design are a soil moisture sensor, an ambient light sensor as well as a water level depth detection sensor. You could always add more or take away modules depending on what you want to do with your vertical farm. For example, a camera could be used to log plant growth progress over time.
Tanay explains that ThingSpeak, an IoT platform, was used in the project design. Tanay was kind enough to share the source code used in the setup over at Hackster. You can find it along with more details about the project’s construction over at the official project page.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check it out over at Hackster. Be sure to follow Tanay for more cool projects as well as any future updates on this one.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
Such overkill. This could easily be handled by an Arduino microcontroller which would be easier to program, exponentially cheaper, and exponentially more obtainable. Plus smaller and using less power.
