The Waterball
Waterball is an open-source hardware and software project for monitoring hydroponics.
It's also intended to help with the research and development of HomeBus, an IoT auto-provisioning framework. It's based on the "furball", which is an homage to Dave Mills' "Fuzzball", one of the first routers on the nascent Internet.
The Furball hardware performs environmental monitoring and is intended to be deployed indoors with fixed power source. It will (eventually) auto-provision with HomeBus to feed sensor readings into an IoT system.
Hardware
Waterball is based on the ESP32 processor. ESP32 is more capable than its predecessor, the ESP8266 while remaining inexpensive. The ESP32 supports both 802.11b/g/n Wifi and Bluetooth 4.2/BLE. It also has hardware acceleration for encryption. It includes 4 SPI controllers, 2 I2C controllers, 3 UARTs, up to 18 channels of ADC and two 8 bit DACs.
The hardware should support several common environmental sensors in order of importance:
- temperature
- humidity
- air pressure
- light (lux and a rough break down of red, green and blue intensities)
- water temperature
- water pH
- water level
Temperature, Humidity and Pressure
Waterball uses the BME280 - temperature/pressure/humidity. $2.57 in single unit quantities, AliExpress.
Light
TCS34725 RGB sensor
Water temperature
Dallas 1 wire waterproof temperature sensor
Total Cost
If bought through AliExpress, parts cost should run roughly:
- $4.50 - ESP32 LOLIN32
- $2.57 - BME280
- $1 - TCS34725
- $1 - Dallas 1 wire waterproof temperature sensor
- $1 - DIYMORE pH sensor
- $1 - random resistors, capacitors
Total of roughly $20 in parts before the circuit board.
Software
Waterball uses the Arduino Core for the ESP32. It's built using PlatformIO. With some renaming and rearranging it should also build with the Arduino IDE.
Iterations
The intial version is a simple breadboard.
Second version is a soldered printed circuit breadboard.
The third version will be a custom printed circuit board with modules soldered into it.
The fourth, most ambituous version, will be a custom printed circuit board with surface mount components and will have components mounted directly on it rather than using 3rd party modules.
License
Software and documentation is licensed under the MIT license.
Circuits are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.