Smart Urban Gardening and Plant Care Assistant

Nowadays Urban gardening is very popular and trending hobby for peoples living in metropolitan area. In India, Small rooftop gardens, Balcony and Container Gardening, or Gardens on House Terrace is very common.

Urban gardening refers to the practice of growing plants, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers, in urban or suburban areas. It involves cultivating plants in various settings within cities, such as balconies, rooftops, community gardens, and even small indoor spaces. Urban gardening has gained popularity as a sustainable and accessible way for people in urban environments to connect with nature, produce their own food, and contribute to local green spaces.

Problem Statement

In some modern households I have seen some smart home automations (Smart IoT hubs) extended to these gardening system for basic controls. But I never seen any custom setup with matter ready apps.

In my house I have small Balcony garden. I have Smart Home Assistant, IoT based connected devices setup. I also tried several projects for smart watering systems for it. But I never used matter or thread before. Now I want to implement such project which will be useful for many peoples with such setups.

My goal is to design a smart home system that assists users in growing and maintaining indoor plants and small gardens. The application can provide real-time data on soil moisture, light exposure, and temperature to help users nurture their plants effectively.

I want to design system which will be installed in such Balcony/Terrace garden, sensors like moisture, Light, temperature, Ph, water etc. could be installed in different pots. There will be also motor/pump for watering plants. These devices, sensors hub and actuators. We’ll design them matter/thread ready.

Using WiFi, We will connect our smart urban garden project to smartphones app (Smart Home Assistant/custom) for getting information and control automation. I could also try to connect it to voice assistant system(Alexa Speaker I owned) for control or enquire about system using voice commands.

So in order to achieve above tasks, we need to build hardware which have following facilities -

1. Sensors - moisture, Light, temperature, Ph, water etc

2. MCU Board with Wireless Connectivity - Bluetooth/BLE, WiFi, ZigBee, Matter etc. So we will be able to connect to Smart Home System.

3. Actuators - Water Pump for distributing water to the plants as per moisture level.

Thank you#Hackster and #Nordic Semiconductor for organizing such amazing contest, "Make it Matter!" and sponsoring and supporting my Idea with nRF7002 Wi-Fi 6 Development Kit along with an nRF52840 Dongle.

nRF7002 DK, which combines Nordic’s ultra-low power technologies with Wi-Fi 6 capability, supporting all wireless protocols used in Matter: Bluetooth LE for commissioning, Thread for low-power mesh, and Wi-Fi for high-throughput.

Key features of nRF7002 DK:

• Supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth mesh, NFC, Thread and Zigbee
• One of the very few certified embedded reference designs in the market, supporting dual-band and Target Wake Time.
• 2.4 GHz, 2.4/5 GHz, and NFC antennas
• User-programmable LEDs(2) and buttons(2)
• SWF RF connector for direct RF measurements
• On-board SEGGER J-Link debugger/programmer
• Arduino Uno Rev3 form factor
• Pins for measuring power consumption

So, the main theme of this contest is 'Create an innovative, human-centered, Matter-ready smart home application'. Let's see in brief about what is actually this standard means.

What is Matter ?

Matter is an open standard for smart home technology that lets your device work with any Matter-certified ecosystem using a single protocol. Matter comes from the Connectivity Standards Alliance, an organization of hundreds of companies creating products for the smart home.

Matter, formerly known as Project Connected Home over IP (Project CHIP), is an open-source, royalty-free connectivity standard being developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly known as the Zigbee Alliance. The project aims to create a unified and secure standard for smart home devices, enhancing interoperability and simplifying the development process for manufacturers.

Matter is championed by Apple, Amazon, Google, Nordic Semiconductor, Samsung, and hundreds of other companies in consumer IoT.

How does Project/solution will work?

In this project, I will try to use both approaches,

1. Matter over Wi-Fi,

2. Matter over Thread (BLE/ZigBee).

I will use,

• nRF7002 as Matter controller,
• Raspberry pi with running CHIP Tool on Debian/Raspbian Linux. As a Thread border router,
• and (extra/optional) matter nodes/matter devices ESP32c2/c3 boards with matter SDK firmware.

nRF7002 development board will be interfaced with sensors (soil moisture, light exposure, and temperature+humidity) to collect the physical/environmental parameters of the garden plants. This device will also control the water sourcing pump. nRF7002 will be programmed as matter controller application. I will connect all end nodes to nRF7002 DK to get the real time data acquisition and control of irrigation automation.

I’ll create one border router or use CHIP Tool on Linux PC (probably RPi4). All these devices connected to WiFI network and will use Matter or thread whichever applicable.

I will try implement basic automation over this network also at edge level for irrigation(watering system) for plants with respect to moisture level. I will try to program this system and its parameters to be get monitored on Smartphone (matter compatible) App.

*(Project is still under development)*