Collecting the tech used to monitor a cactus. (First post in six years. 😳 so out of practice…)
This system is largely built from things that I had laying around. It works well enough. I have a mishmash of sensors using the 915MHz that collect through the common gateway here and into Home Assistant, but going to focus just on the plant here.
Most new things that I add are using ESPHome, but these aren’t broke.
The bits
Three parts here, from the top down.
Collection and Dashboards
On the top of it all, I’m now running Home Assistant to handle all the work of collecting and displaying of data. In the past, I used NodeRED and a bunch of things there. But as I tried to pull in various other home automation things, I got tired of the amount of rebuilding to make and keep the flows working. I have Home Assistant running in Docker on my Synology.
Gateway Bridge
For the Gateway and Sensors, I’m using the 2.3.2 version of MySensors. The gateway software is from the esp8266 gateway with the following setup for the radio.
#define MY_RADIO_RFM69
#define MY_RFM69_FREQUENCY RFM69_915MHZ
#define MY_IS_RFM69HW
#define MY_RFM69_ENABLE_ENCRYPTION
#define MY_RFM69_IRQ_PIN 15
#define MY_RFM69_IRQ_NUM digitalPinToInterrupt(MY_RFM69_IRQ_PIN)
#define MY_RFM69_CS_PIN 2
#define MY_RFM69_RST_PIN 16
The gateway hardware is:
Then I printed a custom case. But any box will work.
Sensor Nodes
The plant sensor hardware is built on Moteinos because I have a bunch of these from a prior project.
- Moteino With the RFM69HCW
- WeatherShield
- GA1A12S202 Log-scale Analog Light Sensor This is discontinued, but any analog or digital light level sensor could be used.
- SparkFun Soil Moisture Sensor
The firmware for this sensor is a combination of the following examples: