Gardening with the Raspberry Pi is nothing new, but using the the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller is another story. This week, a maker called Chrad changed that by sharing their creation of a useful houseplant monitoring system based on a Pico.
Not only does the system have the capacity to monitor up to three plants, it also outputs detailed status information to a Waveshare Pico OLED screen. Some of the metrics it tracks include temperature, humidity and moisture levels in the soil.
The best Raspberry Pi projects are easy to recreate, and Chrad has shared a complete parts list for anyone interested in creating their own Pico-powered houseplant sensor system. You'll need a few things like a DHT22 air temperature and humidity sensor and three capacitive soil moisture sensors, to get started. Check out the project page at GitHub for the full list.
According to Chrad, the system is designed to check the current status of each sensor once every minute. The display is updated with the most recent information, while a .csv file is updated to create a detailed log of the sensor changes.
Explore the original thread at Reddit for more details and a closer look at how this Pico plant sensor project works.
