OK so here’s what I have so far…
The plant we’re experimenting with uhh looking after. It’s a snake plant (we named it Python), which is apparently one of the best plants for improving indoor air quality.
(source)
This plant doesn’t need a lot of watering anyway and is easy to care for so should be perfect to test with. After that I’ll look at something that requires more maintenance, maybe a bonsai tree, or an orchid.
Here’s the water pump
Soil sensor
Stuff together on a breadboard. I’m using a sense-HAT for its LED matrix right now as I haven’t got one of the cheap I2C ones yet.
We’ve chosen the capacitative soil moisture sensor for its resiliency against corrosion, but I noticed the upper part of the board still has components that are unprotected. To address this I bought a can of this spray rubber coating to try. Hopefully it will protect the components without rendering the sensor unusable, but we’ll see!
I’ll start putting together some software next.