Hello all,I am a Mechanical Engineer by trade and love to garden in my spare time. Recently I have had less and less time to devote to caring for my plants (mainly having time, or being home to water them) and decided to rig up an automatic watering system.I had the idea to buy some of the parts I use at work, as I am familiar with them. This would include an AC to DC power supply connected to a Siemens logic controller, running to a relay with a solenoid valve. This way I could write a simple program to send a signal to the solenoid every few hours to water my plants.After looking into it, I was wondering if the same build may be possible with a cheaper controller? The one im looking at is about $150 with many inputs and outputs, where as im really only using one. Sorry I have very little knowledge of electrical components at this time and my attempts to research online have been unsuccsessful.While attempting to research I did notice several "pre-built" watering systems that operated similarly to my idea, and a few that were different. Is this even a good design to control water, or should I take a different approach?
if you're just after a simple time based watering system then you could buy a simple $10 time switch and program in a few on times a day - even the mechanical ones can do 1/4 hour steps and the electronic ones should let you set your times to within a minute.Not sure what you are growing (not hydroponic marijuana I hope 