I’ve orderes some cobber tape on Amazon and plan to see if I can build a capacitor for water tank level detection. After giving it a bit of thought, I don’t think we can make a sensor that is cheaper and better than the one in the flower-part of the pot, but that one is to long to fit in the water-resevoir so we need to make our own for that. The tolerences are also much bigger for that one, so it may be we’ll be ok without voltage regulation and all the other fancy functions of the proper moisture sensor inside the pot.
Perhaps not cheaper but it depends what you mean by better. The sensor that you are using to determine when to water is just binary. Your new parasitic capacitance sensor may just
be as useful to help determine when to water and if it comes in at the top of the pot may also be better for reducing the leak problem. Hysteresis is a big factor in watering plants for both the plant health and battery savings. In general plants like to dry out between watering so air can get at the roots.(speaking as a green thumb. Can’t speak of hydroponics though.
Looking forward to see how your experiment with the new capacitance moisture sensor goes.
Well, we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted 
How much room is there in the water resevoir? Would this fit?
There is about 90 mm of space, and this device is more than 13mm including the circuitry, so it wouldn’t fit if it is mounted with the connectors up. It could be mounted the other way - that would make it an almost perfect fit, but that would get us an even bigger hole to get tight.
I haven’t been keeping up on the full thread and not across all of your constraints, but did you consider using a ToF sensor for water level?
It’s what I’m using on my similar project (just uploaded a few new progress pics).
I also use this approach for my coffee machine reservoir.
Good morning folks, I am very pleased to have stumbled upon this thread. This is the perfect design for an automated irrigation system. I’ve been working on a project like this since last year, but this year, I wanted to upgrade it to have app support and to be able to track every aspect through a phone app, and think this is the place that this will be made possible.
Any updates on the status of the Flutter app/Arduino code? I’m leaning more toward an interactive app rather than HA controlling and tracking for my personal edition of this project.
Thank you in advance!
I like that project. I think I’ll be making a copy paste of that when it’s done.
As for the sensor, Its a good way of solving the issue in your design, but I’m not so sure it would work in our application. It drives the price up considerably and it also takes up a lot of space at a placement that will be hard to integrate aesthetically.
How about using a magnet on a floater inside the water-tank and some reedswitches on the other side? It will not be as accurate, but it would mean no wires would have to cross any moisture barriers and it’s a very simple sensor to get a reliable result from.
1 Like
Price wise I buy them for about $3 AUD shipped. So pretty good I reckon?
AU $2.10 10%OFF | Thinary VL53L0X Time-of-Flight (ToF) Laser Ranging Sensor Breakout 940nm GY-VL53L0XV2 Laser Distance Module I2C IIC 3.3V/5V
https://a.aliexpress.com/_mKSZzsu
But yeah totally fair enough if placement is awkward.
Or rather, I would like to know more about how the ESP HA system would work if that is possible because I have no past experience with it?
Thank you in advance!
@konig did you get a chance to have a look at any of the pull requests on github regarding the code?
This isn’t really the place for a discourse on how to run esphome I’m afraid. There are plenty of really good resources out there, including this forum.
This is how the watering program looks like on my phone. Looks like an app. HA allows you to adjust it as you want.
2 Likes
Thank you very much!
Do I need to have the physical board to install the ESP HA and then I integrate the code?
I saw you made them, but I didn’t look through it. If the function as you mentioned, then that’s really cool. Nice addtion to the project Is action required from my part? (I’m not a git expert - far from, actually )
New at it myself. I think if you are happy with them then merge them. Not sure how that is done. Anything I have put in I have got working on an ESP32. I can then try new features and do a pull request.
3 aud is certainly manageble. The ones I found on google were physically quite a bit bigger and also priced at at least 25 aud (-ish… Obviously I don’t pay for stuff in Aud). That would drive the price pr. unit up considerably.
Since they are so tiny they shouldn’t ruin the looks of the pot that much. It’s also a fairly good argument that if you strip the pot you can easily use everything in another application - such as yours. All you have to do is to change the parameters to fit a bigger or smaller pot.
Lets go with the range finder. I’ll update the physical parts accordingly.