There was a long delay with no update about my projects. The reason for this is, I focused on other non electronic related projects. I promised to publish all files and information about the plant watering sensor project in August, and here are all the files.
First some Important Notes
Even with these files, it is a very advanced project to do. To produce the PCB, you need a board house which is used to precise and high quality PCBs, like Eurocircuits. Also all pads are prepared to reflow soldering, and not hand soldering. It may be possible to solder the resistors in place using a regular solder iron, but it will be hard to do.
Programming the very small MCU is another difficult task. You will need the correct development environment Atmel Studio from Microchip to do so. You also need a programmer, like the Atmel-ICE and a special socket where you can temporarily connect and power the chip for programming. Because of the design and default configuration of the chip, you have to pre-program the chip and activate the wireDEBUG protocol.
At last, the foot part needs to have an environmental sealing. Otherwise, the regular solder mask of the boards will quickly wear off, and the copper of the traces may kill your plants.
You have to be experienced in producing microcontroller based hardware designs using SMD components and a reflow process. You also need to be skilled with programming tools and devices.
License
The documentation of the hardware is licensed under the CERN OHL v1.2 or later. You can find all details about the license here. The GIT repository contains a copy of the license.
Files
All files are in this GIT repository:
https://github.com/LuckyResistor/PlantWateringSensor
I will add more details later, but these are the raw files with all information you need to produce your own sensor.
If you have questions, miss some information or just have any feedback, feel free to add a comment below.
Have fun!
Hi,
For some reason the eagle files for sensor head are not in sync, Eagle will not let you edit anymore, was this intentional ?
Anyway nice work on the series
Vlad
No, not intentional, I will have to investigate this. Probably an Eagle version problem. But I assume you can open and view them, so it is not that urgent.
found the problem 😛 its the description attribute for the bat holder is missing in the .brd you can copy it over from the schematic 🙂
Question about the design – do you really need 0.2 drill size or you went with the smallest possible drill size available at Eurocircuit?
This small drill size was chosen to allow for tented vias and to make them (almost) invisible. Increasing the drill size and therefore the pad sizes for the vias may have undesired side effects to the copper fill. So you have to carefully check the design after a such change. The copper fill around the oscillator part and MCU on the board must stay intact.