1 Proposal
Desktop Greenhouse can make pleasant scene and fresh moisture air. But it will take extra effort to irrigation and monitoring for better growth without natural sunshine. With this control hub base on CY8CKIT-048 PSoC® Analog Coprocessor Pioneer Kit, people can counting the time and degree the green plants get sun-shined and how much the water shall be irrigated.
This can be a prototype of self-sustainable ecosystem balance platform for research.
2 Design
There have sensors boards or IoT boards aroud us, but Only CY8CKIT can offer the chance of hardware Programming capacity for customized sensors. In this proposal , besides basic sensor, as much as sensor would be included in this design for better functions.
2.1 Hardware
Hardware is CY8CKIT-048 PSoC® Analog Coprocessor Pioneer Kit with soil resistance detection rods, battery pack, water pump, relay switch.
Scheme for Hardware shall be shown too.
The soil moist can change the resistance between 2 copper rode buried in soil of plant pot, The block in left side shown the the variation of ADC sample and feed.
In this chart, a capacitor is attached in this diagram for isolate Direct current and reduce power consumption. In this pilot demo, this capacitor shall be removed in test. The best solution is a pulse wave applied to the Vdd pin with AC generated, thus the ADC pin can get sample data more precisely.
The lest block and motor are off board. The rest of block shall be in Chip and programmed by PSoc Creator.
2.2 Software
PSoC Creator Integrated Design Environment (IDE) shall be used to program for analogue front end for soil resistance and ambient light sensor. With ARM-M0 core, relay switch and be controlled for switch on/off the pump motor for water irrigation. This can be of especially help, when one is off the table on vacation.
The pin for ADC sample and PUMP control is shown in the following chart and easily shown.
The logic is that, when the motor is dry, the pump is on for 5 seconds, and pause 5s for further detection to see if the moist is still reach new threshold. The value of threshold low and high shall be decided by test. In most case, the soil resistance is higher than 100k if it is dry, and it is below 1K if it wet. So the value is fairly easy to be set. And the exact value varies by the gap between two rods. So, test is a must choice except calculated sizing is done.
The code passes the build and run easily and prove to be OK.
3 Conclusion
The codes are attached as follows. PSoC analogue is kind of innovation, combine the calculation and FPGA-like function. It sure comes to a new age of IoT sensing. A further carefully design project shall be made to fully utilize this development board. It is really one amazing invention by Cypress.
Comments