MudPi an Open Source Smart Garden and Plant management and monitoring system for the Raspberry Pi.
Whether you are a seasoned gardener or like me, you hear plants screaming in horror when you go in to a garden center, then this system will help keep your leafy friends looking forward to a long and healthy life.
Mudpi is an automated open source plant management system that is capable of monitoring and watering your garden plants, potted plants and green house, keeping them in their optimum conditions. Not only is this a time saver for the gardening enthusiast but also for the casual forgetful gardener. When you're busy or on holiday it's good to know your plants will be properly tended. The summer holiday is usually the time of year my garden potted plants meet a shriveled end.
MudPi's key features are:
- Automated Watering using only the required water and resources
- Remote & Scheduled Controls
- Monitor soil moisture, light, humidity, weather conditions
- Customisable and Scalable
- Can be used with existing irrigation systems
- PiCamera photo's of your plants
- Manual controls
- Manage conditions for seedlings and mature plants from one system
So what can MudPi do?
Imagine a Garden with a few potted plants that need regular watering, garden plants in a raised bed that need less attention and then a controlled area for seedlings. Each area needs different requirments.
MudPi is a python3 script that runs on a Raspberry Pi, which monitors sensors and then activates other connected devices once certain criteria is met.
To water the garden some type of irrigation system should be setup which is connected to a pump and a relay to switch it on and off. A soil moisture content sensor are setup and configured to take readings from the sensor.
Once the moisture falls below the sensors threshold the Raspberry Pi switches the relay and turns the pump on to water the garden. This is not limited to sprinklers or hoses as drip feeders or any device connected to the pump and relay or Raspberry Pi, can be controlled. Once complete the water is switched off again.
Additional sensors can be setup for other flower beds and containers so each area can be managed to their own requirements.
You can take general readings such as the current garden temperature or the temperature in a green house. If your seedlings are getting too hot then you could configure a motor to open and close a vent.
On some occasions you might want to plant some new plants in a flower bed or vegetable patch, which you want to water straight away. For this you can setup a switch that waters the garden or a zoned area of the garden on demand.
With the use of a Rain sensor MudPi can monitor how much rain and how heavy it is. The user can write custom addons to capture the readings and keep a log of wather conditions.
If you use a water tank to water your garden then you could have a sensor monitor the tanks water levels. Allowing you to top it up when required.
The data collected by the Pi is stored in memory using Redis and overwritten with each new reading. This can be used to show live data on a local webpage or you can create your own system to store the current readings for other uses.
Mudpi is fully configurable and scalable. So you can manage a single plant to multiple areas of your garden.
Add as many sensors and switches as you can connect to the Pi.
The system can be expanded with an Adrunio board if you need to use analogue inputs or connect to other garden systems you may have. This allows MudPi to be the central control system.
MudPi uses a .config file to setup all the sensors andinteractions. This is fully explained on the MudPi website and there is also a config tool available so you can easily setup sensors and relays which outputs and text file you can use for the basis of your setup.
There is a lot of good infomation, documentation and setup examples available on the MudPi website at mudpi.app
There are also a easy setup development kit soon to be available for the Raspberry Pi and Ardunio. As the whole system is open source you can modify the setup yourself if required.
Example parts used to set-up a MudPi system