A simple monitoring system for your potted plants and windowsill gardens that will track & record:

• Soil Moisture Levels
• Air Temperature
• Received Sunlight

This system uses RaspberryPi, the Pimoroni Enviro pHat, and SparkFun's Soil Moisture Sensor.

All collected data is copied and updated to a computer & destination designated by the user.
To ensure quick and non-interupted data transfer, make sure to authenticate a key from the Pi to your computer.

All data collected is automatically written and copied in a format that is compatible with the Mac OS X Grapher application, making visual solar, moisture, and temperature data easily availible.

Install the latest version of Raspbian onto the Pi.

Install the Enviro pHat library onto the Pi by typing the following:

curl -sS get.pimoroni.com/envirophat | bash

Type y when prompted, then restart the Pi to ensure the changes occur.

To install this repository, type:

git clone https://github.com/markdgoodrich/GardenBox.git

You are now ready to start recording data.

To constantly record & transmit data, type:

cd GardenBox

Then, type:

python Record_Data.py

This will initiate the Data Recording Set-up. You will be prompted to enter your username, where Username is the username for your computer destination computer, IP.address is the IP address of that computer, and /Path/To/Folder is the directory where you want your exported data files. As an example, assume your username is 'MarkG', your IP address is 192.168.0.100, and you want to store your data in '~/Documents/GardenBox/Data_Text', then you would type:

Enter your username (ex. owner1): MarkG
Enter the IP Address (ex. 192.168.0.XXX): 192.168.0.100
Enter the exported data location (ex. /Documents): /Documents/GardenBox/Data_Text

Note: Do not include the Tilde "~" in your directory input; it's already hard-coded into the program.

You will see this message:

nohup: ignoring input and appending output to 'nohup.out'

You can now exit from your Pi; the monitoring process will continue without halting.