Watering Plants

Last year the plants on my balcony did not really do that well, I guess they could have used some water during the vacation.

This year I have decided to go nerd on the problem: I am building a remote controlled plant watering pump which is controlled by Nethome Server.  I also want it to be able to measure the moisture level in the plant soil and preferably also the water level in the tank.

I don’t want wires across the apartment and out on the balcony so the unit has to be battery powered and remote controlled. I don’t want to worry about flooding the balcony while I am away, so it must have a local tank with limited amounts of water (in case of a leak or malfunction)

Since I will be using the open 433MHz band for controlling it, I don’t really want to control the pump totally via radio (what if the “off” signal is drowned in interference?) so I also want the local hardware to control how long the pump is running each time with some sort of timer.  Next step:  find suitable parts…