This bit of research came about because we live in a very dry part of the UK (the county of Suffolk, which is part of the East Anglia region) and we don't get much rain. We have had a bird bath in our garden for many years and it is very popular with the local birds. But it often dries out and we have to fill in by hand.
The challenge was to automate the filling of the bird bath and to make it a zero-touch user experience user experience.
The actual hardware to achieve a self-filling bird bath is really quite simple. We have a rain water harvesting system, with a large storage tank. A number of 12V dc pumps are connected to it and under control of our contextual smart home.
The real challenge (and why we undertook this research project) is to intelligent control the pump using one of our controllers. This enables us to very easily configure the bird bath filler pump to come on every other day (actually Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday) for a short time period.
We can also add a very simple rule to ensure this doesn't happen if the rain water harvesting tank is empty.
