For the fun of it
Added a small greenhouse with a fan and some heating pads controlled with the motor board. Seems to work ok, but temperature still drops too much! Currently still trying different configurations of heating pads. The temperature is checked every 2 minutes and turns on the fan and heating pads.
I ended up adding an Adafruit M
otor HAT to the raspberry pi controlling the position of the camera pan and tilt. That way I can use one of the two controls for the NEMA-17 I bought some time ago. I was planning on using this as a proper raspberry pi HAT but this works well enough until I find a better method that uses less resources. Well this is much simpler than old way I was doing that used too many GPIO pins. The old method of using two L293D used too many GPIO pins. This Motor HAT is i2c so I have a lot of GPIO pins left in this raspberry pi as it is. The spare motor control will be used for controlling the water pump. I still need a way to open/close some valves easily.
Well, camera 1 is now on wheels. Control through the web will be added later, right now is only through the command prompt. The wheels are on a Actobotics frame bought from Servocity.
I am also using a stepper motor, that way I can keep count of how many steps I move ‘forward’ or ‘backwards’. All of this is of course controlled by the Raspberry Pi using Python code and a couple of L293D chips.
Another recent addition is control of two valves for watering bonsai or the other plants like strawberries and beans. I am also using L293D chip to control these valves and the pump (12V). These valves seem to have been taken from coffee machines. Nice and robust but also 12V. I am finally using all those pins on the newer Raspberry Pi 2. There are of course HATs that you can buy that could simplify the setup.