Soil Monitor
Arduino based automated soil monitor
What exactly is the “soil monitor”?
The plant monitor is a culmination of curiosity and being too stubborn to give up. I wrote all the code for both the arduino and the site backend. It went through a few iterations of design, but the current design is pretty stable. The setup is an ESP32 base station coded to receive the data from the arduino plant monitors via an nRF24 radio. The moisture data is collected by the arduino using a capacitive moisture sensor.
I’m already working on how to fully automate the system so that the plants water themselves, but I’m not quite there yet. Currently, I am more focused on learning how to design custom PCBs in order to get all the components onto one circuit board, removing the need for so many wires and soldering.
As of now, the monitor gets about 2 1/2 months of battery life off two 2800maH Li-ion cells. I’d like to explore using only one cell and incorporating solar charging as well, but I need some time to source the components.
Update 6/2/2024:
After some research, I decided to order some RT9167 3.3v regulators, as they looked like they would be pretty efficient and would be a direct drop-in replacement for the original regulator on the 3.3 Pro Mini. With the addition of this regulator, I was able to swap over to using a single 21700 cell and 3d printed an enclosure for it. I have yet to run a full battery out, but so far it looks to be working well!
