If you’re considering automating your hydroponics garden, this board from GrowTek might be the perfect match! Featuring 8 MOSFET outputs as well as 4 differential load cell inputs, you can easily control lighting, pumps and any other actuators you have in your garden. For example, the system could automatically monitor nutrient levels in the water, and when the nutrient level drops, it’ll automatically weigh and dispense the exact amount of nutrient needed to bring the system back into equilibrium.
The ESP32 is used as the main microcontroller, so it’s possible to have live data from your hydroponics setup fed to a web page or other tracking system such as MQTT. This way, trends over time can be examined and any long-term negative trends can be corrected before they become problematic. Alarms could be set in case certain parameters go too high or too low, and therefore require human intervention! This system could be used in many other applications as well, not just hydroponics; the integrated load-cell inputs mean any project where weight needs to be measured and outputs changed based on them would be a great solution. Also, because the load-cell inputs go into an HX711 ADC, any differential input could be connected!
An external programmer is required, but these are readily available (including from Tindie!) and there are many tools available for ESP32 development, including Arduino, NodeMCU (Lua), and of course C/C++ using the ESP32 development libraries. If you have no experience with the ESP32, check out Hackaday.io and you’ll find some great tutorials and example projects.
