This is the sixth 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, fourth and fifth part please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The fifth part ended with step 24, where I talked about calculating the total…
Category: Projects
This category contains all projects.
Successful Measurements
Using the new method of measurement, described in this post, I could successfully collect some meaningful data. This time, the read values are the exact values of the final sensor without a different kind of oscillator. I watered the plant at day zero with quite a great amount of water. From there you can see…
Plant Watering Sensor – Long Term Tests Take #2
I started a second take on the long term tests for the plant watering sensor. This tests are required to be sure, the measurements follow the expected cycles. After watering the sensor, the frequency should go down and while the soil is drying up, the frequency should go up the the initial value. Logging this…
Plastic Cup Meltdown – Working with Epoxy
Currently I am working on the coating for the foot part of the plant watering sensor. Here I already tried a wide range of techniques and materials. At the moment, epoxy seems the perfect material choice – so I am trying different resins and hardeners to get the best results. Some hardeners are very reactive…
Plant Watering Sensor Foot Parts from Eurocircuits
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…
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…
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…
A Versatile ATtiny Programming Adapter
As mentioned in my article about designing a cheap plant watering sensor, I built a small adapter which can be used to pre-program the ATtiny13A. This is necessary, because once soldered on the board, I only have a debugWire interface, which has to be enabled first. The adapter has a small 50mil JTAG header, where…
Plant Watering Sensor – Precise Current Measurement
As I wrote in the first part of my article, how to design a cheap plant watering sensor, I had troubles to get exact measurements of the current, using my Testo multimeter. I searched for a solution and found the µCurrent Gold device, from David L. Jones known for the EEVblog. Later a little bit…
SMD LEDs Tests
Today I tested a number of SMD LEDs for the plant watering sensor project. I soldered all 13 LEDs I shortlisted onto a small board and connected it to an Arduino Zero Pro. So I could try the different flashing styles I planed to use more or less automatically. That way I could focus on the LED flashing itself,…