Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
2022-03-06 2:02 pm
Learn to use Soil Moisture Sensors with microcontrollers and build a Soil Moisture Meter and an automated watering system that uses the Arduino IoT Cloud!
There are many methods of measuring the moisture content of soil, but the two types that are most commonly used by hobbyists are resistive and capacitive sensors.
I’ll show you how to use and calibrate both of these types of sensors, both with analog and I2C interfaces.
After we get our sensors calibrated, we’ll use them to build a soil moisture meter using a Raspberry Pi Pico and an OLED display.
We’ll then focus our attention on the main project in this video, an automated watering system that uses an Arduino Nano 33 IoT and works on the Arduino IoT Cloud. This will allow you to maintain your solid at a specific moisture level and monitor it from anywhere on the Internet, with both a desktop and mobile interface.
Here is the Table of Contents for this video:
00:00 - Introduction
01:55 - Soil Moisture Sensors
07:06 - Moisture Sensor Calibration
14:49 - I2C Moisture Sensors
20:52 - Build a Soil Moisture Meter
29:30 - IoT Plant Watering System
52:33 - Conclusion
I’ll also explain why I’m the last person on planet Earth that you’ll want to get gardening advice from!
I hope you enjoy the video.
Bill
"Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window." — Steve Wozniak
Inst-Tech and robotBuilder reacted
2022-03-06 8:41 pm
Yesterday I built two 5' x 3' raised garden beds for my wife. I would like to use this project to add automated watering to each of the garden beds. Does anyone know how to determine soil moisture sensor spacing? My google search results were primarily for farm fields.
2022-03-06 9:08 pm
Interesting question.
Mark the half way point on each of the walls. That will give you a 9 point grid (including the centre point of the bed). Use a moisture meter to measure and record the moisture level at each corner, midpoint and the centre point.
Then, water the bed the way you expect your irrigation system to work.
Wait half an hour to an hour to allow the added water to spread out in the bed and then repeat the process from the first paragraph.
Calculate the differences in before and after results at each point.
If the difference at each point is substantially the same, then a single moisture sensor will probably be sufficient as it seems that the water has spread evenly.
If some point's differences are significantly higher than the rest, you'll probably need additional sensor coverage to handle that area.
Anything seems possible when you don't know what you're talking about.
huckOhio reacted
2022-03-06 9:19 pm
@will I have had many gardens most made of raised plots 4'x4' (sq ft gardener) the most recent was 24 ft x 18 ft. I watered with a single wave sprinkler and never saw less than 100% coverage. If you plan on using instead a 1/4" line fed drippers and sprayers, as long as you overlap a single probe in the middle will suffice. Check out Lee Valley for a systematic approach. Very cool, but the cost vs a hardware store variety wave sprinkler is an order of magnitude more. Good luck.
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
Sure you can learn to be a programmer, it will take the same amount of time for me to learn to be a Doctor.
Inst-Tech reacted
2022-03-06 11:04 pm
I could not help it, I rebuilt the project using an ESP32, mqtt and node red. as I cannot post images yet, here is a link to my dashboard https://imgur.com/gallery/FYksNIW
DroneBot Workshop reacted
2022-03-06 11:09 pm
Does anyone know how to determine soil moisture sensor spacing?
In my experience these soil water meters are not too good at determining the soil readings in a large raised bed due to the fact that on a sunny day the moisture at the top level can be quite dry, but down where the roots are the soil can still be suitably damp. I would use a watering regime that takes the temperature and sun hours into account so that on sunny days hot days you turn on a water feed say 3 times a day but maybe just once a day for dull overcast days etc. The timing and duration of a watering session will have to be determined by experience of your conditions, but can be happily automated with suitable sensors once a little manual observation is done.
Get your wife to stick a finger in the soil at intervals and at various depths and log the results so you can automate you watering system based on sound analysis. But maybe this is not such a good idea 🤔 so don't tell her I suggested it.
I think these soil moisture meters are probably better used for small flower pots and the like. Well thats my experience anyway. 😎