If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, summer is nearly here, along with the corresponding need for increased plant watering. You could do this by hand, or turn to conventional house-connected watering systems. Brendan Beesley, however, took things in a different direction and created a standalone solar-powered garden irrigation system with an Arduino Nano ESP32 as the brains of the operation.
Beesley’s setup uses seven solenoid valve to control seven irrigation zones, each scheduled to water twice a day. A solar power/battery backup keeps everything running without any connection to mains power, (hopefully) even on cloudy days. A real-time clock, with its own coin-cell battery backup, ensures the correct time even if the rest of the system shuts down.
As of now, the system is “trimmed to barebones just so [beesleb] could get it out there and working.” This agricultural hacker is considering expanding it further, perhaps taking advantage of the ESP32 to create a Wi-Fi dashboard. A bot could then – potentially – be integrated for control and reports via text messaging, and the hardware could be expanded with sensors to track temperature, moisture levels, flow rates, and more.
If you want to build your own off-grid irrigation system, code and more info can be found on GitHub, and there is plenty of useful discussion on the build’s Reddit post. While you may or may not want to duplicate this configuration exactly, it could be an excellent starting point for your own off-grid solution!