Feedback on OpenAg Sensor Poll #1 - "New" Gardening Tech

[AndrewB]

Also, the Adafruit and Sparkfun ESP32 boards have been found to mis represent the amount of current they use. This means they are not good for low-power deep sleep applications.

But a clone by EZSBC has designed one that uses far less power in deep sleep than the others. It is a good option.

https://news.ezsbc.com/esp32-in-feather-format/

https://www.ezsbc.com/index.php/products/esp32-feather.html

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https://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=45931

https://blog.voneicken.com/2018/lp-wifi-esp32-boards/

[AndrewB]

So, not many people are probably interested in this, but I wanted to share. I finally went back to get the CSU soil logger board working. I ended up needing to buy a new ESP32 brain, but the new one came with USB-C and had circuit-python support, which ended up helping a lot for fast code iteration. I never had any working code to begin with, just some code example from my old professor that was written for another micro-controller (Particle Boron).

So after lots of work every weekend for months I was able to 1.create several test programs in circuit-python to physically test the hardware (found some issues), and then write some working code. I have one working carrier board and 3 working soil moisture / soil temp sensors.

I plan to use this to help take data on my pepper project, and help to estimate GDD for the season. I don't have a LUX or light sensor on it yet, but I can always add more sensors later.

Right now i have it so it can save data on an SDcard. It also can upload to Ubidots for dashboard data visualization. This is all with a lipo battery and wifi. I've optimized the routine with deep sleep to save power really well. Another option I will explore later is using another cheap ESP32 based touchscreen (really cheap) to either use ESP-NOW (low power communication better than wifi) or wifi + ubidots retrieve to have a local dashboard display of the data in my house.

I can bssically turn this into a weather station by adding more sensors over time.

P.s. I just put a blog post about it on my blog. I know at least one person here mentioned they missed my blog.