Developing an automatic plant irrigation system

I was working with an Arduino the last few weeks and never did before. But not only an Arduino, the Arduino was cooperating with an circuit and communicating with a Raspberry Pi.

Actually, it was pretty fun. But there were some problems for which I still don’t have a solution for. E.g. Arduino IDE not pushing the code with the following error message:

avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding.

There were some posts on the Internet like StackOverflow, but those weren’t the solutions. I would love to find a solution for this, as one of my Arduino’s is useless for now because of that.

The project I was working on was an automatic plant watering system with a webinterface. It had a DHT11, a Photoresistor and a Soil Moisture sensor. With a given threshold reached (for Soil Moisture Sensor and Photoresistor), the Arduino would run the pump to water the plant.

Those sensor data were transferred via a 433 MHz radio module (sender: Arduino, receiver: Raspberry Pi). The Raspberry Pi would then insert those sensor data into a MySQL database. The webinterface (also hosted on the Pi) then queries the database, gets the sensor data and plots them to graphs which looks like the following:

Sources

Yeah, right, talk is cheap. Where was the code? :D