Hi there, we farm with Raspberries and I am trying to find a simple and cost effective way to measure Soil Moisture, Humidity, Temperature and Illuminance.
Has anybody had experience with these sensors that would work with either Sonoff Zigbee hubs or that are simple wifi/ web based?
Your comments are appreciated.
I do not think the range of Zigbee is enough for farming. I have used LoRa sensors before but that is quite expensive as you also need to buy a LoRa hub, although if you get one with Chirpstack v4 integrated it sends out MQTT messages on the local network and you can interact with it using an iHost. If you want to use Zigbee then would just buy a sensor and attach it to an ESP32 C6 pretending to be a normal Zigbee humidity sensor using very basic programming skills. I believe SeeedStudio sell soil humidity sensors you could make one with. I’d bet there are soil sensors for indoor plant pots but I doubt those are cheap.
Pretty sure the Xiao pack of three are on sale from Seeedstudio now. With that combination of 4 capabilities I’d just get a pack, but I’d check Zigbee has the range you need.
As it happens just three hours ago Andrew Speiss released a YouTube video on connecting soil moisture sensors to your internet network.
What he did would need adapting to Zigbee and there is no luminosity etc. but he gets round the range limit by using RS485 which can be a long wire and means the ESP32 chip can be indoors a long way away.
first thing first, how large is your farm? prob you may look into 433mhz, zwave, or loRa for an extensively large farm
Thanks for the replies, I will look into this, the farm is 180ha, but we only have 30ha under cover.
Also, a friendly reminder: even if you have a power supply for router devices in between for larger coverage, be aware of the maximum device quantity in a single setup. It depends on the gateway and the number of router devices.