A Good Humboldt Use For Arduino: Gardening

So yesterday I said I'd write a bit about Arduino, a currently popular type of microcontroller, or single board microcontroller.

Arduino is an open source hardware project that was started in Italy and has spread around the world in the past several years.

If you search on Google for Arduino projects, you'll get more than ten million hits. Arduino microcontroller boards are being used for just about anything and everything that people can think of. And one of those 'things' is gardening.

There are projects like Growduino, Garduino (which has been superseded by growerbot), and the Horto Domi Kickstarter project.

In the Humboldt Microcontrollers community activities, one of the projects I plan to work on is some type of application for Arduino in the garden. A recent post at Cooking Hacks was about the launch of their Open Garden Project. The post says:

"...there is a lot of interest in urban or terraces vertical gardens that allow grow vegetables in the city centers controlling firsthand the level of fertilizer used. This week, we are happy to announce our newest product: Open Garden. We put our knowledge of electronics and sensors at the service of gardening and hydroponics, trying to help all of you interested in gardening and plants. Open Garden is a platform for garden control using sensors oriented both exterior and interior gardening or even hydroponic farming. The aim of the platform is to measure parameters such as Soil moisture (Indoor & Outdoor kits), Water sensors: pH, Conductivity, Temperature (Hydroponics kit), and Temperature, Humidity and Light (All kits)...Open Garden programming has been developed as Open Source so that users can access the source code to customize and adapt to their needs..."

We'll probably discuss some Arduino gardening applications at the May 15 meeting, so if you're interested in either automated gardening or the video tutorials about the basics of Arduino, come to The Link at 1385 8th Street, Arcata, CA, USA, from 6 to 8 PM on Thursday, May 15.

Hope to see you at The Link! If you have questions about the Humboldt Microcontrollers community, send me (Bob Waldron) an email at arcatabob (at) gmail [dott] com.

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