In my previous apartment I had set up a few self watering planters I made from recycled kitty litter buckets. The planters have a reservoir of water that keeps the soil moist longer. It reduces maintenance, but I still needed to top off the reservoirs every few days. So of course I set about on trying to rig up something to refill them for me.
The idea was to have a larger enclosed tank that can resupply the smaller reservoirs of each planter. To accomplish this, my system would need to:
- Monitor the level of the water in the reservoir
- Engage a pump to transfer water from the tank to the planter
- Disengage the pump
I had some IR transistors that I picked up a few years ago that never got used beyond turning on some LED’s and decided this would be the perfect application for them. I would use them to detect when the water in the planter got too low or too high.
The planter already had some basic floating water gauges. These were just bamboo stakes stuck into wine corks. I would use two thin slices of cork to trigger the IR sensors.
