I received the foot parts of the plant watering sensor from Eurocircuits. As you can see, they have the same great quality as the head parts. Eurocircuits removes any bridges from the boards in a very clean way, so you get the boards with exactly the shape you designed. This saves a lot of work…
Author: Lucky Resistor
No Success with First Long Term Measurement
The first long term measurement I made, to test the behaviour of the sensor over a longer time range was a failure. After the five days with the device introduced in this post, the readings made absolute no sense. The sensor was not moved in the flower pot and the plant was once watered at…
Eurocircuits Delivered Astonishing Perfect Panels
I ordered a single panel as a test for the production version of the plant watering sensor and I got astonishing perfect panels from Eurocircuits. Even I only ordered just one, I got three perfect panels in gold. Thank you very much Eurocircuits! As you can see from the photos, the quality of the panels…
Weller WT Solder Station – Great Tool with Great Issues
Update: Weller solved the problems I describe in this article with a new design of the retainer. This new retainer solves all the problems described in this article. The new retainer looks very different and uses a spring to pull the tip to the heating element. A little bit more than a half year ago…
Soldering Boldport Club project “The Matrix”
For the Boldport Club project “The Matrix” I used hot air soldering for the first time. After some experimenting and with help from Boldport Club members, it worked really well. I could colder the 120 LEDs in less than 10 minutes to the board. I made a video about the process. Please keep in mind, I…
Plant Watering Sensor – Long Term Logging
To gather more long-term measurements for the capacitive method I use for my plant watering sensor, I created this small logging device. As you can see, it uses one of the plant watering sensor prototypes for the measurements. Instead of using the ATtiny13A on the board, it passes the oscillator signal directly to the microprocessor…
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 5)
This is the fifth part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first, second, third and fourth part, please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The fourth part ended with step 20, where I did usability tests and stability…
12 Time Wasting Issues in Autodesk EAGLE
I am a machine engineer and very used to work with CAD software. The abbreviation CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. I personally think, Autodesk Eagle fails with the ‘A’, because often it does not give you any aid. On the contrary it often puts a spoke in the wheel and makes your life horrible….
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 4)
This is the fourth part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first, second and third part please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The third part ended with step 18, planing the final firmware. There a decision…
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 3)
This is the third part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first and second part, please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The second part ended with step 14, designing a first prototype PCB. So…