In August 2024, I traveled to ECHO’s Regional Impact Center in Thailand for two weeks to work on an automatic watering system. The task was to use a microcontroller to turn a water valve on and off based on readings from a soil moisture sensor. The project's intended benefit was developing a low-cost, automated approach to gravity-based drip irrigation that maximizes water use efficiency while meeting the water requirements of plants grown on raised beds.
Trip to Thailand! 🇹🇭
Echo Asia Farm & Seed Bank is located in a small village of Qiang Mai. On the first day of the internship, I was greeted warmly by faculty members.
Jonathan, the director of the training department, also introduced to me the test bed that I would be working on.
A solenoid valve requires about 3psi of pressure to effectively irrigate water across the bed. Therefore, I had to work with the Echo Staff to raise the bucket by 2.5m.
After a brief tour, I was led to my workspace, where I began drawing a simple blueprint of how different components should be connected.
I also found a bunch of tools piled on my desk 😆
Hardware List
1 Arduino Nano
1 DFRobot Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor
1 12V Solenoid Valve (Normally Closed)
1 IRLB8721 N-channel MOSFET
1 0.96’ I2C OLED display (128 X 64 pixels)
1 1N5406 Diode
Shout out to Jonathan for the picture 😎
I created a simple prototype that displays the moisture level on the OLED screen. The above image shows how the OLED displays "very wet" because the sensor is submerged in water.
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