Recently we have been growing more food than buying it from the shops. This gives us freshly grown food and saves us a bit of money but it takes longer to grow and maintain. This device helps to monitor different plants and the environment it is growing in.
it has taken me a while to get this device working correctly in the environment it will be placed. It needs to read the sensors and send the data somewhere for display. The Device uses an ESP8266 to send the data over WIFI to the internet. This device will also need to be waterproof because of the environment it will be placed in to.
The Data gets sent to http://climatesens.com/, Climate Sens stores the data and compares it with data from around the world.
Sensors in the Device
This device has 2 temperature sensors on it, one at the top of the drive and one at the bottom. The sensor at the top will read the air temperature around the device. If the sun is hitting the device, this temperature will increase the temperature. The bottom sensor is placed right at the bottom device, in the soil. this is to read the temperature of the soil. The sun will not have a direct effect on this sensor but may overtime when the soil heats up.
This is the sensor is a capacitive soil sensor that is apart of the main body, running down into the soil. It uses a PWM signal from the microcontroller to pulse down the sensors and read the feedback. If the soil is moist, the returning value is less then when it is not.
Other capacitive soil sensors use a separate square wave generator to read the soil. This device does not need this generator because the microcontroller can make the signal needed.
The light sensor is placed at the top of the device and it reads the amount of light to hit the device.