In a quest for smarter garden automation and a successful vegetable garden, Edward Austin has created a fully-automated garden sprinkler control and monitoring system. It uses a wide variety of technologies - that all work well together. Soil moisture data from the garden is sent back to a main Arduino controller which can control water flow, and also send various forms of data including temperature, soil moisture levels and system status to the cloud-based cosm service via the Electric Imp. This allows monitoring from almost any Internet-connected device. Edward's system is an example of what's possible with some planning and the right parts - and demonstrated in the following video:
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To simplify relay control, Edward used our RELAY8: Arduino shield that allows you to drive up to 8 relays from your Arduino using just 2 I/O pins with this shield. It communicates with your board using I2C, so you can even stack several shields together to drive 16, 24, or more outputs! Includes back-EMF protection and works with a wide range of relays. Perfect for home automation projects! For more information and to order, click here.