Biology Plant Monitor

My biology teacher gave us a spider plant to compile a report on. I took it a step further, to his surprise, by automating the watering process using a Raspberry Pi including auto irrigation incorporating a variety of sensors and time-lapse creation.

The Plant is fully capable of looking after itself for around a month until its water tank needs to be refilled. Every 10 minutes it takes readings from the various sensors (light, soil, temperature and humidity) and puts them into a database. It also takes a photo to form a timelapse. All the data is then compiled into a overview image with graphs and timestamps. The graphs are made by a library called matplotlib and the image is compiled with pillow (Python Imaging Library). These tasks are quite demanding for the pi and take 2 minutes to run. One way in which I want to improve it is to add a IR camera with a blue filter to create NVDI images (the type NASA use to show photosynthesis of the earth) which would provide images like this:

Image credit to: K-State Research and Extension under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

This would help highlight areas where the plant was lacking and mean the timelapse could run overnight (currently there is a dark period).

Timelapse:

The code can be viewed here and it is inspired by the internet of seeds project from Piromoni: https://pastebin.com/WC2YDfjm

Piromoni’s version: https://github.com/pimoroni/internet-of-seeds