Ecowitt make a range of low-cost sensors which all transmit to a central hub over 433/915MHz.
They have around 400 feet of range, and it is easy to get the base station to constantly ping a URL with current sensor values.
The soil moisture sensor is available on Amazon or directly from Ecowitt[0].
There is also a HomeAssistant integration[1].
I will second Ecowitt. I switched to them from an Aroya system by Meter Group that costed thousands of dollars and had a yearly subscription in the thousands for my commercial weed operation. Ecowitt is excellent and amazing. No annual subscription at all! Customer service is great as well.
Can one actually get data out of that thing, without uploading it to some random company?
> Live Data on APP: requires a GW1000 WIFI gateway(sold separately) to connect to WiFi, after the WIFI configuration,the live soil moisture data can be viewed on the WS View mobile application
> Graph & History Records on Ecowitt Weather Server: supported to upload to our free Ecowitt Weather server(ecowitt.net) to view the soil moisture data graph and download the history records on the website; it's recommended to add a shortcut of the website on the home screen of your phone for quick access
Question:
Any suggestions on some easy ways to make a web page which displays a status value, where the status is updated by a simple shell command? You mention pinging a URL with sensor values, which seems similar to what I want to do (which is to see if a remote location has power and internet connectivity or not, so I don't bother driving to work if the power is out).
Not in the same vein as the discussion, but something as simple as a Pi pinging https://healthchecks.io/ or a similar tool could work well for your needs.
You mention pinging a URL with sensor values, which seems similar to what I want to do (which is to see if a remote location has power and internet connectivity or not, so I don't bother driving to work if the power is out).
You don't need a fancy wireless weather station for that. Just put a tiny server at the remote location. If you can't ping it then the power or internet is out, and you can stay at home.
node-red, along with the dashboard extension[1] would serve a HTTP server that could have many inputs, such as a shell command. You'd run that on a server, not the client.
It works okay: it drops around 10% of the data due to reception issues, but I think it might be related the parameters I have set for the gain on the software defined radio.
Nice! Capacitance moisture sensor is totally the way to go. I've never ordered up a custom board with all the little SMD stuff. If anyone is making a big batch of these I'd love to find a way to piggyback on that order.
I am ordering 10000 capacitive moisture and temperature sensor boards with an microcontroller wired to 100 wifi and bluetooth gateways including labour and programming for around $5 or €5 per sensor. Most of the cost per sensor is labour so could be omitted.
If you want to piggyback onto this order or collaborate please send an email to morphle at ziggo dot nl.
We can lower the price per moisture sensor down to $1.42 when we order 100000 or more or by dropping labour intensive features.
At a shared/combined batch order of 1 million sensors we will drop to $0.30 per sensor. At this point it is economical to have a sensor per plant (or mecanically planted seed).
With optional starlink and solar panels and batteries for full offgrid operation. Custom software features in an app for smartphone or laptop with a https://microblocks.fun type programmability and spreadsheet graphs and website output would be optional.
We could add microphones and motion sensors to sense rodents or snails or monitor (rain)forest for illegal cutting with chainsaws or poachers.
Chiming in to day I would also participate in this order. I have a farm and would love to automate aspects of my irrigation and have been looking for something like this. This in combination with soil temperature would be very beneficial.
Often these moisture sensors (and other sensors here) can have high rates of error. Just something to keep in mind if you use it in a professional setting. But if they are cheap enough you can probably normalize out the variance and get a better reading.
Would you be interested in letting me ask you a few questions about what you would be looking for when automating your farm? I am working on an early stage startup on the topic please contact me at https://uverd.co/contact.html or leave a comment here. Thanks
Would it be sufficient to just have a cheap BLE pressure sensor that you could place underneath a potted plant and look for cyclical variations of pressure to determine when to water? I would think that any sensor in contact with the soil is going to have a much shorter lifespan than one which is kept dry and in a less reactive environment.
Yeah, this is my thinking, though I haven't built a proof of concept yet.
Load Cell Weight Pressure Sensors are AUD$5 or so, and I reason a shallow receptacle of sand sitting outdoors, where rain can fall in, and direct sunlight can slowly evaporate the water, should provide a sufficiently accurate analogue for soil moisture.
Certainly I would expect it would be easy enough to calibrate, using different depths of the medium, different types of medium (coir, perhaps), etc. An upside-down plastic pot saucer sitting under the tray would provide sufficient water-proofing for the pressure sensor, I'd expect.
Excess water drains out the bottom of potted plants. You'd need a coffee-scale style (e.g. Acaia Pearl) sensor, where the electronics are shielded from water from above. Those aren't cheap.
You can probably fairly easily average out the low-frequency pressure changes. Trivially, you can consider the minimum weight per week the weight of the plant, and calculate the difference based on that.
I was recently thinking about a similar hardware (although I have no hardware background). I have a lot of plants, some shared with my roommates, and many frequently die. Taking care of plants together is hard and sometimes we are all away for a few weeks so somebody else is taking care. I would love to have an app that alerts me if something basic is wrong, for which 90% of the time would be too much or not enough water. But what I would need is a cheap plant sensor, I would need like 10 or 15, I don't want to spend more than a few bucks per plant. I didn't find an available solution! I've found a few sensors but they were way to expensive. I know quite a few struggling with plants, having great plans but then killing most so I think quite a few would be interested.
I don't know whether the sensors are too expensive or what's the problem. This looks like the right idea, a dumb sensor that could be paired with a inexpensive hub plugged in somewhere talking to some server that distributed notifications and statistics to an app.
A few decades ago, I have made an automatic watering system for the plants from the balcony of my apartment, which has worked many years without problems.
The cost for the electronic parts was negligible, but assembling the device required some work (mostly for the water pipes, which had to be cut and bent at the right sizes, and then they had to be fixed on some walls).
Water was brought through a pipe from the bathroom (from the water reservoir of the toilet, which was mounted at a greater height than the plants, so the water flowed naturally towards them; as an alternative one can add a manifold on an input pipe with cold water, to provide an extra branch for the water, in which case there should be enough pressure to reach greater heights), it passed through an electrovalve recovered from a washing machine, and it was distributed through some thin pipes to the plants.
The humidity sensor was printed on a PCB and the electronic part consisted of an operational amplifier, a transistor and a relay that actuated the electrovalve, to turn on and off the water going to the plants.
The operational amplifier (a model with high impedance inputs) was connected as a Schmitt trigger with the inputs to a resistor bridge that included the humidity sensor and there were 2 adjustable resistors used to modify the thresholds of the Schmitt trigger, for controlling the humidity levels at which the water was turned on and off.
The schematics was adapted from one published in some hobby electronics magazine, so I assume that a search through old collections of such magazines would find many examples.
I have used a single humidity sensor and a single electrovalve, common for all, because there was never a significant difference between the humidity levels at different plants.
When this is not true, a separate electrovalve can be inserted on each branch of the pipes, with a separate humidity sensor.
For the humidity sensor, it may be a good idea to reuse some old PCBs with edge connectors whose contacts are gold-plated, e.g. the PCBs of some old memory modules (after cutting the PCB part with the memory chips and soldering a wire across all contacts). Using the gold-plated contacts for soil contact avoids the oxidation problems that would appear in unprotected copper.
I guess no from following the wiki, but is there a way to just buy these modules without any hardware assembly required? I'm interested in hackishly monitoring the soil moisture and this seems great, but not so much into PCB fabrication etc.
Very cool, I bookmarked this to come back to later. As a gardener who recently built a home server, I hope to eventually set up a soil moisture monitoring system, which I could then in turn eventually hook up to an automatic watering system.
My rough idea of how this would work would be a bunch of sensors that I then hook up to something like influxDB/grafana. If anyone has built such a system themselves I'd love to know how you did it.
Readit News
[0]: https://www.ecowitt.com/shop/goodsDetail/19
[1]: https://github.com/garbled1/homeassistant_ecowitt
"The frequency of products sold in US/CA is 915 MHz ; The European 868 MHz；The Australia 433 MHz."
> Live Data on APP: requires a GW1000 WIFI gateway(sold separately) to connect to WiFi, after the WIFI configuration,the live soil moisture data can be viewed on the WS View mobile application
> Graph & History Records on Ecowitt Weather Server: supported to upload to our free Ecowitt Weather server(ecowitt.net) to view the soil moisture data graph and download the history records on the website; it's recommended to add a shortcut of the website on the home screen of your phone for quick access
EDIT: It seems you don't need the bridge if you use rtl_433: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33286401
You don't need a fancy wireless weather station for that. Just put a tiny server at the remote location. If you can't ping it then the power or internet is out, and you can stay at home.
If the script is external then it must be capable of making a http request to the server where a script does something similar to the scenario above.
1. https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-dashboard
https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
It works okay: it drops around 10% of the data due to reception issues, but I think it might be related the parameters I have set for the gain on the software defined radio.
This guys tests a bunch and found most of them shipping from aliexpress were bad.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGP38bz-K48
If you want to piggyback onto this order or collaborate please send an email to morphle at ziggo dot nl.
We can lower the price per moisture sensor down to $1.42 when we order 100000 or more or by dropping labour intensive features.
At a shared/combined batch order of 1 million sensors we will drop to $0.30 per sensor. At this point it is economical to have a sensor per plant (or mecanically planted seed).
With optional starlink and solar panels and batteries for full offgrid operation. Custom software features in an app for smartphone or laptop with a https://microblocks.fun type programmability and spreadsheet graphs and website output would be optional. We could add microphones and motion sensors to sense rodents or snails or monitor (rain)forest for illegal cutting with chainsaws or poachers.
https://m.fr.aliexpress.com/item/32689223035.html?html=stati...
https://www.amazon.fr/Corrosion-Resistant-Capacitive-Moistur...
If not I run www.openagriculturesupply.com amd would love to help find something that does.
https://oshpark.com/ they offer free shipping from memory - really cheap. i got these shipped from America to Australia :)
for 1 design - you get 3 pcbs (identical)
Load Cell Weight Pressure Sensors are AUD$5 or so, and I reason a shallow receptacle of sand sitting outdoors, where rain can fall in, and direct sunlight can slowly evaporate the water, should provide a sufficiently accurate analogue for soil moisture.
Certainly I would expect it would be easy enough to calibrate, using different depths of the medium, different types of medium (coir, perhaps), etc. An upside-down plastic pot saucer sitting under the tray would provide sufficient water-proofing for the pressure sensor, I'd expect.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io
https://github.com/rbaron/b-parasite#home-assistant
I don't know whether the sensors are too expensive or what's the problem. This looks like the right idea, a dumb sensor that could be paired with a inexpensive hub plugged in somewhere talking to some server that distributed notifications and statistics to an app.
The cost for the electronic parts was negligible, but assembling the device required some work (mostly for the water pipes, which had to be cut and bent at the right sizes, and then they had to be fixed on some walls).
Water was brought through a pipe from the bathroom (from the water reservoir of the toilet, which was mounted at a greater height than the plants, so the water flowed naturally towards them; as an alternative one can add a manifold on an input pipe with cold water, to provide an extra branch for the water, in which case there should be enough pressure to reach greater heights), it passed through an electrovalve recovered from a washing machine, and it was distributed through some thin pipes to the plants.
The humidity sensor was printed on a PCB and the electronic part consisted of an operational amplifier, a transistor and a relay that actuated the electrovalve, to turn on and off the water going to the plants.
The operational amplifier (a model with high impedance inputs) was connected as a Schmitt trigger with the inputs to a resistor bridge that included the humidity sensor and there were 2 adjustable resistors used to modify the thresholds of the Schmitt trigger, for controlling the humidity levels at which the water was turned on and off.
The schematics was adapted from one published in some hobby electronics magazine, so I assume that a search through old collections of such magazines would find many examples.
I have used a single humidity sensor and a single electrovalve, common for all, because there was never a significant difference between the humidity levels at different plants.
When this is not true, a separate electrovalve can be inserted on each branch of the pipes, with a separate humidity sensor.
For the humidity sensor, it may be a good idea to reuse some old PCBs with edge connectors whose contacts are gold-plated, e.g. the PCBs of some old memory modules (after cutting the PCB part with the memory chips and soldering a wire across all contacts). Using the gold-plated contacts for soil contact avoids the oxidation problems that would appear in unprotected copper.
Needs to be paired with a device to plug it into: https://sonoff.tech/product/accessories/ms01/
My rough idea of how this would work would be a bunch of sensors that I then hook up to something like influxDB/grafana. If anyone has built such a system themselves I'd love to know how you did it.