greeneye

Updates and pictures to come as I chip away at this project!

JUN 18, 2026 -------

This project took a spot on the back burner as I focused on my new responsibilities as Electrical Team Lead of the SJSU Robotics team. However, I've recently been looking into incorporating a capacitive soil moisture meter (meant for use with Arduino projects) and designing the custom RP2040 circuit. Since completing my first year of study in Electrical Engineering at SJSU, I've decided I want to focus more on hardware, so I intend to keep the firmware to a minimum while still creating a useful project. I've added a plan for a USB-C charging circuit for a small LIPO battery to make the device more self-contained, and intend to make the RP2040 carrier more general-purpose with a PCB hat for the sensors in this specific project. Schematic images to come once I have a preliminary circuit!

JAN 12, 2026 -------

I've set up a breadboard with the I2C bus of an AHT20 (temperature and humidity), a VEML7700 (lux), and an SSD1306-derived OLED display (specifically, a GME12864-13). Currently, I'm working on writing drivers and establishing the basic flow of the program to establish proof of concept before moving into circuit design. Integrating the rotary encoder into the circuit and writing its driver is next on my list, followed by battery power.

Feel free to follow my programming through my GitHub repo→!

DEC 29, 2025 -------

As a plant parent, I've been looking for devices to help keep my green children happy -- but nothing I found online quite did what I wanted it to. Then I remembered that I could just build one myself.

Hence, the idea for greeneye was born. 

Currently, I've begun work on the preliminary circuit and set up my programming environment in VS Code. As of right now, the anticipated functionality will incorporate I2C sensors for humidity, ambient light, and temperature, as well as C programming on an RP2040 (though the first prototype will use a full Raspberry Pi Pico as the microcontroller). I intend to make the device portable and battery-powered with a small I2C OLED display and a quadrature rotary encoder with a built-in SPST pushbutton for user input.