Flower pot

Several parts that we used to build some self-watering flower pots.  Most of them are based on Lechuza's W14Q planter (and W16Q), but with a small pump and a water tank extension rather than their string-thing, which did not work for some of our plants.

We have a small 5V pump at the bottom of the water tank, and a hose running up into our “carrot” which gets the water close to the roots of our plants.

There are some clips that hold the hose in place – even when it wiggles when water gets pumped through it.

EDIT: yes, we had to modify the water level indicator, but that could be easily accomplished with a tooth pick:

There is just enough space in the corner for a small microcontroller:

We used simple ESP8266 µC to control the pump over MQTT, and a crontab entry to start the pump cycle, based on the plant's thirst and where we positioned it.  See the file plant-pump.ino for the sketch: The ESP drives the pump with a simple PN2222 BJT.  Base resistor is 220 Ohm.  1N4148 diode for the pump motor. Default MQTT topic is home/plant01/pump, payload is the duration in [ms] default: 5000 (five seconds).

We hope you find some of our STLs useful or inspiring.  OpenSCAD files are included for your changes & adjustments.

Have fun!  ☺