The electrical conductivity sensor is used to monitor the concentration of nutrients and minerals in the solution being routed to the plants. The one selected for this project is the DFRobot Gravity Analog EC Meter. The 5V supply voltage will be provided by the RPi, and the analog output will be converted to digital using the ADS1015 because the RPi GPIO lacks analog input. After calibrating the sensor, we use I2C to interface with both the EC sensor and pH sensor. See issue #4 for I2C implementation.
DFRobot has a library made for their EC, pH, and other sensors to use to compute the values in mS/cm based on the voltage of the signal and temperature of the solution.
After initializing an instance of the EC meter for the first time, we can calibrate the sensor using the calibration(voltage,temperature) method with a given temperature. If within an acceptable range, it will store the calibration values as reference for later readings. We can then use the readEC(voltage, temperature) method to calculate the measurements.
The electrical conductivity sensor is used to monitor the concentration of nutrients and minerals in the solution being routed to the plants. The one selected for this project is the DFRobot Gravity Analog EC Meter. The 5V supply voltage will be provided by the RPi, and the analog output will be converted to digital using the ADS1015 because the RPi GPIO lacks analog input. After calibrating the sensor, we use I2C to interface with both the EC sensor and pH sensor. See issue #4 for I2C implementation.
DFRobot has a library made for their EC, pH, and other sensors to use to compute the values in mS/cm based on the voltage of the signal and temperature of the solution.
After initializing an instance of the EC meter for the first time, we can calibrate the sensor using the
calibration(voltage,temperature)method with a given temperature. If within an acceptable range, it will store the calibration values as reference for later readings. We can then use thereadEC(voltage, temperature)method to calculate the measurements.