
House plants need attention and when you’re sitting at your desk working away, sometimes you forget to look after them. Our patient is “Gary” a Gasteria succulent from Ikea who needs very little care, and that means I forget to water him. So how can the Raspberry Pi Pico W help me to take better care of Gary?
Soil moisture sensors measure the conductivity of the soil and send the value to the Raspberry Pi Pico W (or other microcontroller) as a voltage. This voltage is read by an analog GPIO pin and converted to a value between 0 and 65535. The lower the number, the drier the soil. This can then be used as a trigger to send a message.