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davidxjohnson / iot-garden

Code, wiki, project board and diagrams for an IOT-based automated garden.
MIT License
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better soil moisture sensor management #4

Closed davidxjohnson closed 1 year ago

davidxjohnson commented 1 year ago

Turn off voltage to the soil moisture sensor when not in use. This will extend the life of sensor and provide more accurate periodic readings. This requires a circuit change and thus a higher priority while in the prototyping stage.

davidxjohnson commented 1 year ago

The V+ wire from the sensor was wired to pin D2 and power is turned on/off by the MCU. Preliminary testing suggests that the polling interval should not be less than 1 minute. Any faster and the moisture reading begins to read lower with each polling. It may be that there is energy released into the soil that affects the reading if not allowed to dissipate. I'll let this run over night at a 1 minute polling interval to see what the readings do.

davidxjohnson commented 1 year ago

Ran sketch over night. Moisture and temp readings are much more consistent. Overall, an easy and useful feature to extend longevity of moisture probes.