This thesis presents an irrigation system for a home garden that decides on watering from measured soil moisture and a weather forecast rather than from a fixed schedule. The design is distributed: battery powered sensor nodes based on the ESP8266 microcontroller measure moisture and temperature and send the readings to a controller node over the ESP-NOW protocol; the controller opens solenoid valves through power transistors and forwards the data over MQTT to a server with an SQLite database. The user operates the system through an Android application. The decision is based on a water balance and runs deterministically in program code, while a language model only puts the computed result into words. Powering the moisture sensor through a control output extended the estimated battery life from 24 to 501 days. The system keeps watering even when the server or the internet connection fails.
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