Automated hot pepper Irrigation

Watering 52 plants by hand is a lot of work. So why not automate it?

Automated hot pepper Irrigation

I am almost finished with my automation project for my hot peppers. I have 52 different varieties of hot peppers planted and I am too lazy to look after them all the time.

I bought 8 MiFlora Sensors on Aliexpress and connected them to Homeassistant via an ESP32 and the ESP-Home integration (shows up as MQTT device). I display those values in homeassistant with the mini-graph-card in a vertical-stack-card

type: horizontal-stack
cards:
  - type: custom:mini-graph-card
    entities:
      - sensor.p1_moisture
    line_color: blue
    line_width: 8
    font_size: 75
  - type: custom:mini-graph-card
    entities:
      - sensor.p1_temperature
    line_color: '#e74c3c'
    line_width: 8
    font_size: 75
  - type: custom:mini-graph-card
    entities:
      - sensor.p1_illuminance
    line_color: orange
    line_width: 8
    font_size: 75

The camera is from Unifi and takes a screenshot every 15 minutes (script, not homeassistant) to create a timelapse that I will post on youtube at the end of the growing season: https://youtu.be/TXCEtC7r1EM

The irrigation is set up with BigTimer from node-red, it will turn on the powerswitch on the pump for 30 seconds and notify me on my phone at the start and end of the irrigation: https://youtu.be/GOIrmJn9vrU

This also decrements a counter in homeassistant (max/default 12), this is also used in a template sensor with value_template times 9 (to simulate how many litres are in the rain barrel).

It will notify me when the estimated water fill level is below 30L/20L/10L so that I can refill it.