A Bluetooth Low Energy soil moisture sensor

Ecowitt make a range of low-cost sensors which all transmit to a central hub over 433&#x2F;915MHz. They have around 400 feet of range, and it is easy to get the base station to constantly ping a URL with current sensor values. The soil moisture sensor is available on Amazon or directly from Ecowitt[0]. There is also a HomeAssistant integration[1].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecowitt.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;goodsDetail&#x2F;19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecowitt.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;goodsDetail&#x2F;19</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garbled1&#x2F;homeassistant_ecowitt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;garbled1&#x2F;homeassistant_ecowitt</a>

Capacitive sensors are better <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=udmJyncDvw0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=udmJyncDvw0</a><p>This guys tests a bunch and found most of them shipping from aliexpress were bad.. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IGP38bz-K48" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IGP38bz-K48</a>

Nice! Capacitance moisture sensor is totally the way to go. I&#x27;ve never ordered up a custom board with all the little SMD stuff. If anyone is making a big batch of these I&#x27;d love to find a way to piggyback on that order.

Would it be sufficient to just have a cheap BLE pressure sensor that you could place underneath a potted plant and look for cyclical variations of pressure to determine when to water? I would think that any sensor in contact with the soil is going to have a much shorter lifespan than one which is kept dry and in a less reactive environment.

Write a <i>Home Assistant</i> [0] integration and suddenly you will gain a large set of followers who will also get it into the other closed systems.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io</a>

I was recently thinking about a similar hardware (although I have no hardware background). I have a lot of plants, some shared with my roommates, and many frequently die. Taking care of plants together is hard and sometimes we are all away for a few weeks so somebody else is taking care. I would love to have an app that alerts me if something basic is wrong, for which 90% of the time would be too much or not enough water. But what I would need is a cheap plant sensor, I would need like 10 or 15, I don&#x27;t want to spend more than a few bucks per plant. I didn&#x27;t find an available solution! I&#x27;ve found a few sensors but they were way to expensive. I know quite a few struggling with plants, having great plans but then killing most so I think quite a few would be interested.<p>I don&#x27;t know whether the sensors are too expensive or what&#x27;s the problem. This looks like the right idea, a dumb sensor that could be paired with a inexpensive hub plugged in somewhere talking to some server that distributed notifications and statistics to an app.

I guess no from following the wiki, but is there a way to <i>just buy these modules</i> without any hardware assembly required? I&#x27;m interested in hackishly monitoring the soil moisture and this seems great, but not so much into PCB fabrication etc.

Very cool, I bookmarked this to come back to later. As a gardener who recently built a home server, I hope to eventually set up a soil moisture monitoring system, which I could then in turn eventually hook up to an automatic watering system.<p>My rough idea of how this would work would be a bunch of sensors that I then hook up to something like influxDB&#x2F;grafana. If anyone has built such a system themselves I&#x27;d love to know how you did it.

Would be great if this could be solar powered.<p>Something makes me feel uneasy about using batteries to keep plants alive (probably unjust compared to solar production cost over only a few years of use.)

Does anyone know what kind of range you get with BTLE sensors like this? I&#x27;d think a decent distance would be required in most cases, and BTLE is meant to be short range.<p>A while back I built a LoRa device and we got really good range, 10km at least without having to try too hard, the plan was to deploy 100&#x27;s of these so it was complicated ensuring communications without collisions, and also this was for a controller not a sensor, which is much harder on the battery as the device needs to listen periodically for updates.

Cool to see this on the front page. I stumbled across this a few months ago when looking to make something similar (I have done relatively little embedded programming and was interested in a hobby experiment). I would really like to understand how to design circuits and send them off to be manufactured (especially for something like a soil moisture sensor, which presumably needs the circuit bit to be water proofed).

Very roughly, how much would the combined parts for these cost, for, say, 10 or 100? How much extra would mentioned DMT assembly be?

This is really cool! I&#x27;m already running Home Assistant and have bluetooth temp&#x2F;humidity sensors around the house, so it would be great to add some of these. I&#x27;ve never ordered a PCB like this before with SMT assembly. I have some other PCBs that I would like to design and manufacture, so it will be helpful to start with this and learn how to do it.

I would love a POE variation of this. I&#x27;m getting ready to start trenching for pop-up sprinklers and I am going to use the opportunity to run some ethernet lines out for cameras &amp; sensors. It would be awesome to burry maintenance free moisture sensors in the process.

This is cool. wonder if conformal coating over this would be enough to survive the outdoors

Is BLE kind of turning into the open source alternative to ZigBee&#x2F;zwave?

All soil moisture sensors will eventually become uncalibrated, wear out, or fail.<p>The only automation you need to keep a plant alive is a timer attached to a water source. Also, don&#x27;t forget to feed it with nutrients every month or so... they don&#x27;t eat soil and letting a plant starve isn&#x27;t proof you needed a moisture sensor.