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Watering the garden with valves per MQTT over WiFi using an ESP8266

 Some infos

The vegetable garden must be regularly supplied with water. To save water, I use drip hoses, and to simplify my life, I have automated the control of the irrigation.

It began with a command of a box with 5 magnetic valves from Hunter. The box contained 5 valves Hunter PGV 101 MMB (3/4", 25mm). The valves need 24VAC, so we need a transformer. As the valves are never open at the same time a current of 1A should suffice. There are cheap relay shields out there with Optocoupler, perfect for this project. An ESP8266 (Lolin/Wemos D1 mini pro V2 ) connects us with the network over WiFi and MQTT and is used to send commands and get data. The ESP8266 board is also powered by the transformer. This is done with a LM2596 DC/DC buck converter breakout board.

As the whole thing is contained in a  IP65 waterproof enclosure, I wanted to monitor temperature and humidity in the box and added a BMP280 sensor. A piece of PLA from my 3D printer created with FreeCAD (files on git) helped to connect everything together.

All infos on: http://www.weigu.lu/microcontroller/garden_watering/index.html

All code and files on github:
https://github.com/weigu1/garden_watering