The afordable DIY resilient smart garden kit

Abstract

Our climate is changing rapidly, and the effects of that have shown themselves through the droughts in California. In an effort to become more resilient, people become more interested in growing their own food, but do not have sufficient gardening experience and education on conserving water. Previous work has attempted to develop resilient smart gardens that support the user in automated watering using simple embedded boards. However, none of these solutions proved to be scalable nor are they easy to replicate for people at home. We developed a smart resilient garden kit with IoT devices that is easy to rebuild and scales up. We use an Arduino board and a number of sensors connected to a planter. Data gets stored in a local database and is accessible via a web app and a web page. The resilient smart garden provides a learning environment that helps bridging between computer science and this sustainability-centric application domain.