This stunning smart planter tracks plant health and handles daily care

Gardening is a prime application for smart automation, because plant care requires a lot of monitoring, but is relatively simple to execute. Large-scale agricultural operations are already highly automated, so why not do the same thing with your house plants? Giovanni Mannara (AKA Ingeimaks) did so in style by building this smart planter system that does everything.

Before we even get to the technical details, we have to point out that this smart planter looks amazing. It is the kind of planter a person would be happy to display. Mannara had a talented friend design the 3D-printed outer shell of the planter, so he could focus on the engineering tasks.

The first step was selecting a brain and Mannara chose an Arduino® UNO Q (4GB) for the job. Like any “smart planter,” it does the basics of controlling lights and watering (powered via MOSFETs), plus monitoring soil moisture levels and ambient environmental conditions, the latter through a BME280 sensor.

But the use of the UNO Q allowed for dramatically higher intelligence. It looks at the plant through a USB webcam and is able to determine its health by running a computer vision model deployed with Edge Impulse. Sensor readings can do a lot, but the visual monitoring gives the smart planter even more capability. It can tell, for example, if the leaves wilt. Combined with the data from the sensors, that is very powerful. 

Once a plant is in place, the smart planter can do most of the care automatically. But there is an integrated display to show important status information and a web interface, which provides more detail and manual control. Real-time alerts are also sent over Telegram, enabling Mannara to take immediate action remotely.

It looks great and it should keep plants healthier than most of us manage!

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