imedgar / rpi-watering-system

rpi-watering-system is a Raspberry Pi automated watering system

rpi-watering-system

rpi-watering-system is a Raspberry Pi automated watering system based on Ben Eagan's project (https://www.hackster.io/ben-eagan/raspberry-pi-automated-plant-watering-with-website-8af2dc).

Built With

rpi-watering-system is built with the following Stack:

• rpi-watering-system web interface is written using the Flask Python microframework. For now, it runs on Python 2.7. which is most probably already installed on your machine.

• This interface allows to send request to the Raspberry Pi through the GPIO (https://pypi.org/project/RPi.GPIO/)

• It is running on a Gunicorn WSGI server (https://gunicorn.org/). Considering that Flask is only recommended for development purposes, it would not handle a production environment properly.

Software Requirements

• Python 2.7
• Python PIP (python-pip)

Installing:

    user@host:~$ git https://github.com/imedgar/rpi-watering-system
    user@host:~$ cd rpi-watering-system
    user@host:~/rpi-watering-system$ pip install -r requirements.txt #this sets up python deps in your environment  

Setting up the rpi-watering-system environment

server.config

    user@host:~/rpi-watering-system$ touch server.config
    user@host:~/rpi-watering-system$ nano server.config
    
    APP_NAME="web_plants"
    HOST="127.0.0.1"
    PORT= 5000

You can change the host to 0.0.0.0 to public expose the server

Server scripts

Once the server.config has been set, there are 2 scripts to start up or shutdown the server:

• startup.sh
• shutdown.sh

The startup.sh will start the server on the background and save the PID of the process in a file named {app_name}.pid, used after to automatically shutdown the server through the PID process.

Auto watering

There is a method in water.py used in auto_water.py to water the plant only if the soil moisture sensor detects it's needed. In order to automatize it we need to add a cron in the crontab:

    user@host:~/rpi-watering-system$ crontab -e

    0 */2 * * * cd <your path to web_plants>; sudo python auto_water.py

The cron above will be executed every 2h. Although, you can always change its frequency, e.g. (https://crontab.guru/examples.html)

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to Ben Eagan for his code and idea (https://www.hackster.io/ben-eagan/raspberry-pi-automated-plant-watering-with-website-8af2dc)

Author

• Edgar Rubio (https://github.com/imedgar)

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019 Edgar Rubio