Joseph, that does sound pretty convoluted. I’m not sure how much energy a DC motor will need to drive mechanical bike parts. Perhaps a battery and solar charger could do that, but I imagine both of them would need to be large for that to work. Otherwise with a small solar cell, it won’t charge [...]

@Trygve is absolutely right. The stuff that’s done very often in intervals and that must be reliable such as water and even lights, etc should be done in small and reliable code in a microcontroller. Now you can use the serial port to change parameters for those actions (change watering interval from 30 minutes to [...]