So, I’ve had this idea in my head for quite a long time for a low-power water distribution and plant watering system, especially for locations far away from viable power and water sources. Testing and development occurs in my office, however, so the form of artistic license must be applied in order to keep the wife happy! We have a couple of fish tanks in the house anyways, and so everything developed here works out for a nice automatic tank leveling system, anyways.

Check that out! Such a huge improvement over my first circuit, for sure! It’s just hot-glue mounted to cardboard, but has input and output connectors for power, input sensor, and output relay, plus has a dc-to-dc converter so that I have the 12V needed for a driven relay device, plus the 5v needed to power the brain, an ESP8266 with a nifty little OLED built right onto it (WiFi Kit 8).

The first thing I had to figure out was how to actually use this thing that I built… My first project was a huge spaghetti nest that I still keep alive, but now in a slightly upgraded form, screwed down to the top of an old wooden TV dinner table.

This sucker’s a mess, for sure, but it’s a “high functioning” mess! It’s got temperature and humidity sensing via a DHT11, a manually wired up LCD panel, an ESP8266 wifi card, and it’s data is all logged to ThingSpeak.com.

I’ve got other projects and photos to publish, so I’m going to have to finish up this post for now and move on, but stay tuned for code examples and more projects to come!

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