A Place to Start: Garduino

I knew someone would have have done something like this before, and I thought I might even have stumbled across something when I was checking out one of my favorite DIY sites instructables.com. With a little searching, I found a great tutorial on setting up something called a Garduino.

For those of you who might not be familiar with the Arduino, its a very inexpensive micro-controller that I had used for my robotics unit this past year. There is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and support for this platform. Its really easy to learn and there are some great free instructional online tutorials.

So, this tutorial shows how to set up a small house plant water system using an Arduino micro-controller, a small aquarium pump, and a selection of inexpensive sensors. Its a great little tutorial and with just a few minor changes, it really has most of what I need.

About a week later after getting most of the equipment and supplies together (pump, 22 guage wire, nails, relays, resistors, diodes, and Arduino) I was ready to do some soldering!

I soldered the relay terminals to the 22 guage wire. Lesson learned: the terminals (especially #1) is really weak and it broke twice - good thing I had more on hand! I also made the mistake of cutting the wrong side of the pump's power cord - DON'T cut the "ridged" side of the cable! I also soldered the nails to the wire. As I was soldering the wire to the nails, I noticed a residue forming on the nail that was making the solder slide right off. Sure would like to know what that was.

Ok, tomorrow I'm going to set up the moisture sensor!