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Automated window system helps keep the greenhouse climate regulated

Arduino TeamJune 9th, 2022

Greenhouses are excellent ways to grow plants due to their compact nature and the fact that they can absorb and store the sun’s light as heat to keep their internal temperature higher than outside. But when it comes to adding ventilation for cooling things down, decreasing the humidity, or simply to avoid rain, most non-commercial ones still rely on someone to manually open or close the windows. This need for automation is what drove Michael Bernhard to create his own greenhouse climate regulation system.

This project relies on a Nano Every to read the ambient temperature/humidity as well as control up to six motorized windows via three L298N dual H-bridge drivers. The Nano receives commands and other data over WiFi from an accompanying ESP8266 board for wireless remote control with a mobile phone. Each of these components and their connectors were added to a custom PCB and placed within a simple wooden enclosure to keep moisture out. An LCD at the top shows pertinent information such as the time, temperature, and humidity.

The aforementioned WiFi control scheme not only allows for remote control of the windows, but also for the visualization of historical sensors data on a graph. Safety information, including errors and stored EEPROM data, can be viewed on the web application, too.

To see more about this project, you can read Bernhard’s write-up here on Hackster.io.

Boards:Nano Every