6 years, 8 months ago.

A few pointers on the code:

As Jenny indicated the logic can be simplified a little, due to the location of the wait her version only checks the sensors every 3 hours, this one will check constantly unless it's run the pump at which point it will wait 3 hours.

Rather than using the char <something> place holders you may as well put in a best guess for the variables in the code. I'm guessing that the LDR and the moisture sensor will be connected to an analog input of some sort and the pump control will be a digital output.

Comments in the code are always good.

And when you have fixed thresholds or times it's always a good idea to define them as constants at the start of the code rather than a number hidden in the middle of the code. It makes them easier to change in the future and ensures that it will always be consistent if you use the same value in multiple locations.

#include "mbed.h"

#define _MinimumLightLevel 10 // %
#define _MinimumMoistureLevel 40 // %
#define _PumpOnTime 60 // seconds
#define _PumpMinimumOffTime (3*60*60) // seconds

 
AnalogIn LDR(<PinName>);
AnalogIn Moisture(<PinName>);
DigitalOut Pump(<PinName>);
 

int main() {
  Pump = 0;  // turn the pump off on startup.

  while (true) { // loop forever

    // AnalogIn will give a value between 0 and 1 so multiply by 100 to get percent.
    if (  ((LDR*100) > _MinimumLightLevel) && ((Moisture*100) < _MinimumMoistureLevel)) {
      Pump = 1;
      wait (_PumpOnTime );
      Pump = 0;
      wait (_PumpMinimumOffTime);
    }

  }

}

Two things to watch out for:

Firstly some mbed time functions have a maximum time of around half an hour (35.79 minutes to be more precise, it's 2^31 us), I know tickers and timeouts have this issue, I don't know about wait. If you find that your wait for 3 hours isn't working correctly then you may want to write a function to do this e.g.

// function definition goes before the start of main()
// split a wait into blocks of under 35 minutes
void waitALongTime(int hours, int minutes, int seconds) {
  int halfHourLoops = hours*2;  // calculate the number of half hours
  if (minutes >= 30) {    // check if minutes is over half an hour
    halfHourLoops++;
    minutes -= 30;
  }
  while (halfHourLoops) {   // loop waiting for 30 minutes each time
    wait(30*60);
    halfHourLoops--;
  }
  wait(minutes*60 + seconds);  // wait for the remaining time.
}

// the line 
#define _PumpMinimumOffTime (3*60*60) // seconds
// becomes
#define _PumpMinimumOffHours 3

// and the line
      wait (_PumpMinimumOffTime);
// becomes 
      waitALongTime(_PumpMinimumOffHours, 0 , 0)

Secondly you will notice that when comparing the sensor inputs (a float between 0 to 1) to the percentage levels (0 to 100) I did ((sensor*100) > level) rather than (sensor > (level/100)). The reason for this is something that catches out a lot of people who are new to c programming. If I had done this the other way around it would have ended up as being 40/100 which has a value of 0 not 0.4.

In c (or c++) an integer divided by an integer will always result in an integer not a floating point number. Any fractional part will be discarded rather than rounded so 99/100 will be 0 not 1. If you want to force the result to being a floating point number then you need to force one of the numbers used to being a floating point. e.g. 99/100 = 0 but 99/100.0 = 0.99

I'm mentioning this now because it catches everyone out at some point and this way when it does get you you'll at least know what's going on rather than getting very confused as to why two apparently identical calculations are giving you different results.