Man, sometimes you just browse online, you know? Just scrolling through stuff, feeling a bit… blah. One day, I remember seeing this headline pop up, something about “Virgo Monthly Love Horoscope February 2019: Find your romantic destiny!” I’m not even a Virgo, and I don’t really buy into horoscopes, but for some reason, that title just stuck in my head. “Romantic destiny,” huh? It made me think, like, what was my actual destiny, you know? Not with a person, but with my own time, my own hands. What was I supposed to be doing, building, creating?
I was kinda in a rut, just going through the motions. That little phrase kinda nudged me to actually do something, to make something real. I looked around my apartment, and my eyes landed on my sad-looking houseplant in the corner. It was practically begging for water, looking all droopy. And that was it! My “romantic destiny”, at least for that day, became saving that plant and, by extension, building something cool to do it.
So, the idea sparked: a simple, automated plant watering system. I figured, if I could make something practical work, maybe it would kick me out of that rut. First things first, I had to figure out what I needed. I started digging around online, watching some YouTube videos, and scribbling notes. I realized I’d need a small water pump, some flexible tubing, a moisture sensor to tell me if the soil was dry, and some kind of tiny computer, a microcontroller, to run the whole show. I had an old ESP32 lying around from another abandoned project, so that was my brain. I hit up a couple of online stores and ordered the bits and pieces I was missing.
When the packages started arriving, I felt a little surge of excitement. This was happening! I pulled out my breadboard, a bunch of jumper wires, and my trusty soldering iron. I unwrapped the ESP32 – tiny thing, but powerful. The first thing I tackled was the moisture sensor. It was just two prongs you stick into the soil. I wired it up to one of the analog input pins on the ESP32. I remembered from somewhere that I might need a resistor in there to protect the sensor, so I found a small one and popped it into the circuit.
Next was the pump. This little guy was going to push the water. It needed more power than the ESP32 could provide directly, so I had to grab a motor driver module. I wired the pump to the driver, and then the driver to the ESP32. For power, I actually grabbed an old phone charger plug and stripped the wires to hook it up to the motor driver. A bit janky, but it worked. I spent a good hour just making sure all the connections were secure, twisting wires, and double-checking everything against diagrams I found online. Soldering those tiny pins was a bit of a pain, my hands aren’t as steady as they used to be, but I got through it.
With the hardware mostly mocked up, it was time to dive into the code. I fired up the Arduino IDE – it’s what I’m most familiar with for these little chips. I had to install the ESP32 board definitions first, which was a small hassle, always some driver issue or another. But once that was sorted, I started writing.
My first task was to just read the moisture sensor. I found some example code for reading analog inputs and tweaked it. I wanted to see raw numbers, so I just printed them to the serial monitor. I stuck the sensor in dry soil, checked the numbers. Then I stuck it in wet soil and checked again. This gave me my upper and lower bounds for “dry” and “wet.”
Then came the logic for the pump. I wrote a simple `if` statement: if the moisture reading dropped below a certain threshold (my “dry” number), then turn on the pump. I figured out how to control a digital output pin to flip the relay on the motor driver. I added a `delay()` command to make the pump run for, say, 10 seconds, and then turn off. I didn’t want it to run constantly, so I put the whole checking routine inside a loop that would pause for a few hours before checking again.
Connecting the ESP32 to my home Wi-Fi was the next hurdle. It always seems straightforward in tutorials, but for me, it’s always a battle. I kept getting connection timeouts. After about an hour of banging my head against the desk, I realized I had a typo in my Wi-Fi password. Seriously, the simplest things! Once it connected, I added some code to send basic status updates – like “Plant needs water!” or “Pump on!” – to a simple web page hosted right on the ESP32 itself. Nothing fancy, just a few lines of text I could check from my browser.
Once I had the core working on the breadboard, I wanted a more permanent setup. I grabbed a small plastic project box I had. I carefully drilled holes for the USB power cable, the sensor wires, and the tubing. I mounted the ESP32 and the motor driver inside using some small standoffs. I ran the tubing from a small water reservoir – an old, clean plastic bottle – to the plant pot. I tucked the moisture sensor right into the soil near the base of the plant.
The first real test was a mix of excitement and frustration. The pump turned on, but barely any water came out! Turns out, that tiny pump I picked was a bit too weak for the height I needed to push the water, or the tubing was too narrow. Back to the online store I went, ordering a slightly more powerful miniature pump. Swapped that in, and boom! Water started flowing nicely.
I spent the next few days calibrating the sensor. What “dry” really meant varied with the plant, the soil, and even the pot size. I watched my plant, adjusted the moisture threshold in the code, uploaded new versions, and repeated until I felt it was just right. The biggest challenge was making sure it wouldn’t overwater, turning my plant into a soggy mess. I fine-tuned the pump duration and the checking frequency.
And then, it happened. I walked into the living room one morning, and my plant, which had been looking a little sad the day before, was perked up, leaves standing proud. I checked the little web page, and it said “Pump ran at 3 AM.” It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t a commercial product, but I built it. From a vague idea, sparked by a silly horoscope title, to a working system that actually kept my plant alive. That feeling, seeing something you conceived and built with your own hands actually work, that’s a real kind of destiny right there. It wasn’t about finding love in a person, but finding a love for making things and the satisfaction that comes with it.
