Smart Garden Trial ended

A home hydroponic garden that doses its own water, nutrient and pH

A capstone project in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne, 2026.

The trial has ended. The garden ran from 3 September to 21 October 2026 and was shown at the Endeavour exhibition. The controller and the live dashboard that used to be here are now switched off. Thank you for visiting.
The garden at the exhibition: a tank with an acrylic lid and two plants under a purple grow light, a box with four dosing pumps, and reagent bottles

What it did

Measures

An ESP32 reads pH, nutrient strength (TDS), water level and temperature, and the air around the plants, every 10 seconds.

Doses

It tops up water, then nutrient, then pH, each dose sized from how strongly the tank has responded before, so no dose overshoots.

Watches the plants

A Raspberry Pi logs every reading, serves the dashboard and phone alerts, and measures leaf area in centimetres from a photo every 5 minutes.

Results

25 minplain water to in range, no overshoot
57 minback in range after a top-up, with plants in
99.5%of readings stored, none stored twice
2.6×basil leaf area in 8 days, measured by camera

The garden in operation

Exhibition video, 3 min 45 s, no sound: what the camera saw, what the sensors measured, and when the plants would be ready.

What the dashboard showed

Visitors reached the live dashboard from the poster's QR code. These are screenshots from the trial.

Dashboard home page: a tile for each reading against its target, alerts, and the grow-light schedule
Home: every reading against its target, with alerts and the grow-light day.
Dashboard home page on a phone
Trend charts on a phone
Trend charts of pH and nutrient strength with every dose marked
Trends: each measurement over time, with every dose marked.
Grow stage page with the plants' age and the predicted stage timeline
Grow stage: the plants' age, the suggested stage and the predicted timeline.

The team

The three team members beside the garden at the exhibition

Sally Arnold, Xiaoqian Hong and Yipiao Hong
Supervisor: Brian Krongold

Thank you to everyone who visited the garden at the exhibition and followed it on the dashboard.