Just workin

Basically I am almost finisheddd yayy

So as you might of guessed, this is a collection of multiple days.

Man I am kinda losing motivation to do my project. It feels bland and boring to do. I am almost done finishing it. The only thing left is the software part. Idk how I am going to do the 3d printing part since its super expensive and my financial situation wont allow that much money spending. The circuit is done 100% and my 3d model is done. I believe I could ship it but I wouldnt have a working model to showcase but in theory everything works correctly. Anyways yeah.

So this is another collection of multiple days

I didnt know creating 3D CAD models would be this difficult. First I had to learn how to do this and then I had to actually model it myself. Along the way there were several things I encountered that I added that arent in the sketch:

• I added holes for air circulation in the place where water is taken from the tray since I realized that there needs to be air for water to effectively be removed from the dirt.
• I made the component compartment a bit shorter and the plant compartment taller for plant height since it need a good height for healthy roots.
• I added the holes and the pipe for the plastic flexible pipe.
• I added the tray for water storage and I think it turned out pretty good.

Of course I also had to do the model it self but yk. Because of my slow laptop doing anything was HELL.

Helloooo

So this is a collection of multiple days of work since I was too lazy to publish them. Since I hit almost 10 hours I decided to post this.

In these couple of project days I was able to do a lot of stuff that I wanted to do!!!

1. I fully integrated my project onto Obsidian. And let me tell you, Obsidian is the Goat. It is so easy to use and so comfortable. I was able to get the sketch done on it and I was also able to put all the components that I needed to but onto it as well!! Additionally the whiteboard and canvas feature really helped me. Using these features I mapped out the circuit of my project!
2. I chose all the components that I needed and bought everything that I needed. In total it cost me around ~2000 kgrz som which is about 25 dollars.
3. By the time the components arrive, I started the app. I am not good with building apps so I had to vibe code it. I am pretty proud with the design that I chose so its pretty good. However it still needs further testing.
4. I was able to draw the icon for the app and the face expressions for the pot itself.

There were multiple issues that I faced while doing this tho.

My first issue stems from the water source. My trivia was how I was going to get the water: combine it with the pot and make it sleek or make it a separate printable water bottle you can place on the ground? At the end I chose to do the water bottle method since this will allow me to store more water for future use and it will be less of a pain to print.

My second issue came when I was choosing which LED strip to buy. I was stuck between the purple ones and the COD ones. Although both are similar I did not like the Purple color that was radiating from the Purple strips. Because of that I just chose to do the COD ones.

Day #5

Ok day 5 was a pretty short day however I was able to connect the circuit that I had in the wowki website to my blynk “app”.

So my first problem came when I was trying to open the blynk website. I came to realize that blynk wouldnt open in my country so I just used a vpn and it worked perfectly right (in the first attempt) so yeah. After that I was able to open a project and then some datastreams for my values and then I copied the 3 lines of code for connecting with my project.

After that I went and downloaded the blynk app itself and created a very simple UI for the project. There I also had to assign the datastreams to like gauges or buttons like you can see in the screenshot.

After that I searched up how I can translate values from the ESP32 into the blynk app and it was pretty simple. You just had to use VirtualWrite and some other stuff.

At the end I was able to a very simple app test and data test.

In the future sessions I hope to add more features.

Day #3-4

These days were quite the progressive ones. I had a lot of trouble trying to understand how I could simulate the circuitry of my project accurate enough.

First I was thinking of using TinkerCard. It was pretty useful. I was able to use it to learn and practice circuitry using arduino. But it was very limiting and didnt have the components I was looking for (ESP32)

While in my search I was able to find wokwi. Wokwi is incredible, let me tell you that. There I just could do everything. There wasnt all the components I needed but I was able to find a replacement for them (temporary).

At the end I had a:

• Relay modul (for the water pump)
• Relay modul (for the LED lights)
• ILI9341 2.8” screen (for the screen)
• Potentio meter (as a replacement for soil moisture sensor)
• Potentio meter (as another replacement for soil PH sensor)
• DHT22 (for air quality)
• BreadBoard (will be replaced later)
• ESP32 S3 (prolly use another version of the ESP32 but I will use it for now.)

Thankfully I was able to kinda have a demo at the end as well. These two sessions had a lot more success than I thought it would. I thought I would just be spending time learning, but I was able to create a demo.

Day #2.

So today I just messed around with what components I would be using for my pot. Since I lack severe knowledge required for the pot I just did what I could and used what knowledge I had. Of course most of the components that I did choose are placeholders. I mean if they work I will prolly keep em.

So here are the components that I have currently chosen:

1. An LED flourescent light that helps the plant photosynthesize.
2. DTH22 Temperature sensor
3. Capacitive dirt moisture sensor
4. Moisture sensor
5. A 6V DC water pump
6. ESP32 chip
7. MP1584 resistor
8. 12V 2 channel Relay Module
9. MAX485 Module
10. Temporary: jumper wire + breadboard.

So these are all the components that I currently think I will need. I will try and learn how to actually wire these in tomorrows session most likely? And I will prolly use some simulators for it too. And thats all for today.

Day #1.

So today was the day I created the idea for the pot. I had the idea of an AutoPot before but I didnt really have a vivid picture of it, so yeah. Today I mapped out an example sketch of it.

At first I was anxious. I thought that my idea was too overpopulated, there were like a lot of ideas earily similar to mine. So I started to become less motivated. But then, I started noticing a pattern. Not a single one of the pots had all the features and ideas of MY version of the AutoPan.

So I started to note down all the features of my Pot and add features that I didnt have. So collectively I had the ultimate autopot. Here are all the features.

Features:

• Comes in 3 different sizes (you have 3 different sized models)
• An LED flourescent light that helps the plant photosynthesize.
• Sensors to sense the temperature, moisture, quality of the dirt.
• A pump for watering preferrably from an external source.
• An app connected to your Wi-Fi, in which you can choose what plant is inside of the pot and based on your choice the app will recommend and adject its features (LED, Water), or give you a recommendation (swap out dirt or too hot).
• Maybe be a screen for the Plant (optional idk for now, because it might increase price too much)