This is a simple low-cost automated plant watering system, designed to work with Home Assistant based on ESP32 configuration and Over-The-Air (OTA) updates and management from the ESPHome plugin.
The setup uses MQTT protocol to publish sensor data allowing Home Assistant to monitor and trigger watering automations based on automation patterns described in this setup.
The setup includes the following instructions and (working) code;
The project and code is built around low cost M Stack Atom Lite, a low cost minature ESP32-pico based board. I originally tested this with smaller ESP-32 pico based boards, however most of these do not have embedded USB ports so an additional USB/ TTL convertor is required to initially flash these devices and potentially a separate power regulator board would be required.
<img src="https://github.com/rasclatt-dot-com/ESP32-Plant-Waterer-for-ESPHome/blob/68ac2869e89305c3aec70a16f734cccb81066467/assets/Screen%20Shot%202022-08-13%20at%201.52.37%20pm.png" alt="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" title="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" style="display: inline-block; margin: 0 auto; width: 500px">
The M5 Atom Lite includes USB-C connector, onboard RGB LED, and exposes enough GPIO pins to support this project in a single 24mm x 24mm package and available for around $7 USD at the time of writing.
At the time of writing M5Stack also have a nicely packaged watering addon retailing at arround $8 USD, which combines a capacitive water sensor (capacitive sensors have a longer lifespan than the cheaper conductive sensors out there) and low powered water pump in a single unit which is designed to plug straight into the M5 range via a Grove connection which makes the hardware easy to assemble. <img src="https://github.com/rasclatt-dot-com/ESP32-Plant-Waterer-for-ESPHome/blob/68ac2869e89305c3aec70a16f734cccb81066467/assets/waterer.png" alt="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" title="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" style="display: inline-block; margin: 0 auto; width: 500px">
The M5 Atom Lite can provide enough power to run the water pump, (only tested when plugged into use power).
Setup is pretty easy – as the M5 Atom Lite and the watering unit both use a compatible grove connector (cable is provided in the watering kit).
<img src="https://github.com/rasclatt-dot-com/ESP32-Plant-Waterer-for-ESPHome/blob/68ac2869e89305c3aec70a16f734cccb81066467/assets/m5%20setup%202.png" alt="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" title="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" style="display: inline-block; margin: 0 auto; width: 500px">
The easiest way to set this up is to set up a new device in ESPHome and paste the YAML code and run the installation process.
This guide assumes you are familiar with ESPHome, and have installed the MQTT broker service in Home Assistant.
You need to add the "historical_stats" code to Home Assistant "configuration.yaml", and restart Home Assistant, this sensor monitors the number of times watering automations have run in the last 4 hours, and is used to prevent the automation getting in a loop and overwatering. Also as this project does not have a water level sensor in the resevoir this is also used to raise alerts that the water reservoir has run out or the water pipe or is not spraying water into the plant pot. (this last one could save a whole container of water being fed to your carpet if things go wrong!).
Once complete you should see the device show up in MQTT
<img src="https://github.com/rasclatt-dot-com/ESP32-Plant-Waterer-for-ESPHome/blob/68ac2869e89305c3aec70a16f734cccb81066467/assets/Screen%20Shot%202022-08-12%20at%2011.06.21%20am.png" alt="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" title="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" style="display: inline-block; margin: 0 auto; width: 300px">
With the following entities detected;
<img src="https://github.com/rasclatt-dot-com/ESP32-Plant-Waterer-for-ESPHome/blob/d142af60731f68d4294a2b4009cb46d3a226c8d4/assets/Screen%20Shot%202022-08-13%20at%202.41.37%20pm.png" alt="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" title="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" style="display: inline-block; margin: 0 auto; width: 800px">
The example folder has example YAML for the following;
The example YAML files include a dashboard with the folloiing features;
<img src="https://github.com/rasclatt-dot-com/ESP32-Plant-Waterer-for-ESPHome/blob/d142af60731f68d4294a2b4009cb46d3a226c8d4/assets/Screen%20Shot%202022-08-13%20at%202.41.04%20pm.png" alt="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" title="Home Assistant Dashboard configuration" style="display: inline-block; margin: 0 auto; width: 400px">
The watering automation example YAML provides the following features;
The example YAML provides a failsafe automation and alerting of the watering function;
Setup, hardware and code tested and running on;
All YAML code in this repository is heavily commented to provide additional instruction/ guidance on customisation/ configuration for your system. This is intended to make is more understandable and re-usable to a wider audience.