BonsaiBuddy v1.0

I recently became the proud owner of a beautiful Rock Juniper bonsai. However, it requires daily watering and regular monitoring to ensure soil moisture content is maintained.

BonsaiBuddy is an automated system for watering and monitoring house plants that I built using a raspberry pi, a small pump, a suite of sensors, and a Django webserver to control everything remotely.

A 5V relay controls a small pump submersed in the reservoir. A moisture sensor and light sensor are also connected to the pi via GPIO. The moisture sensor consists of two exposed conductors inserted into the soil at a fixed distance. We can measure the conductivity between them and use that to estimate the moisture content.

The pi runs a client application that checks in with the webserver periodically. Sensor data is uploaded to the server (with some crude authentication) and task information is downloaded. A task consists of a target plant, a time schedule, and a volume. The client keeps track of all active tasks and a daemon process wakes up whenever watering is scheduled, turning on the pump for the correct amount of time.

The web server also runs a basic Django web app that allows the user to see all plants, tasks, and sensors updating in real time.

The system is live! Check it out here: https://bonsai-buddy-controller.herokuapp.com/