7 Desktop Gardening Projects for Arduino and Raspberry Pi
Create a DIY smart indoor garden to grow your plants, as well as your knowledge of electronics and programming.
1. Raspberry Pi Desktop Garden
This desktop garden is housed in a fantastic wooden structure made from laser-cut plywood. If you want to use this design for your own urban garden, you can download the file from the creator via Instructables.
2. Arduino Smart Desktop Herb Garden
Small, self-contained, and stylish, this desktop herb garden is perfect for an apartment or small home. It can fit four small seed pots, which might not be a lot, but it can work well for growing a few herbs to use in the kitchen. If you want to re-create the garden structure described in the Instructables guide, you will need a 3D printer.
3. Simple Arduino Plant Watering
A desktop garden can be as simple as taking a pot plant you already have and hooking it up to an automatic watering system. This video will walk you through the beginner-friendly process to show you just how doable it is.
4. Desktop Aeroponics Garden
Not all garden systems use dirt as the growing medium: some projects make use of a method called aeroponics, like this desktop planter. Instead of a traditional watering system, the plant is fed with a fine mist containing fertilizer.
A few different construction methods go into this design, including 3D printing, laser cutting, and vacuum casting. This might not be available to everyone, but reading through the work log on the Arduino Project Hub will still give you plenty of resources and information to take away.
5. Alexa Voice Controlled Herb Box
With a bit of programming experience, you can create a desktop garden that can be controlled with Alexa commands.
This creator set up a few handy commands for his desktop planter, one of them being “Alexa, ask herb box how my plants are”, which tells you which plants are dry. While the project on the Arduino Project Hub serves more as a rough guide than detailed instructions, it will give you a good starting point to launch off from.
6. Raspberry Pi Pico Garden
This desktop garden isn’t the prettiest, but it does make use of parts you could find for cheap second-hand. In this case, a fish tank is used to contain the plants, while a plastic bottle is employed as the water tank.
You can explore the guide, which includes a full parts list, on the blog Ctrl Alt Develop. The components list looks long, but around half of those are optional so make sure to check the notes. If you’re looking for something that will automatically run watering and light cycles, then check out the downloadable code.
7. Easy Arduino Automatic Watering System
This automatic watering system for your desktop garden is as simple as it gets. With very minimal parts, you can get up and running in just 30 minutes. It’s the perfect project for lazy gardeners.
An Adafruit Trinket Pro board was used in this tutorial, but you can of course use an Arduino instead. Parts include plastic tubing, a small air pump, a soil hygrometer, and a plastic bottle to hold the water. The Trinket/Arduino is used to turn the pump on and off depending on the soil hygrometer readings, and the code for this function can be found on Instructables.
Read more: https://www.makeuseof.com/desktop-gardening-projects-for-arduino-and-raspberry-pi/