I have installed my plant (senico radicans) monitor prototype. Not quite finished yet but I want to see how well it works – if at all, before I decalre the boxes done.
The sensor is connected to the wireless relay which is powered by the solar cell. The wires lead into the wireless relay via a couple of grommets. I have not wired up the button/LED yet, and the holes are a little too close to the edge for comfort, so I might remake the cover.
The base station can be hundreds of yards away but it actually only about 4′ away. It receives the moisture and battery data from the base station using LoRa wireless, and then relays it to https://www.lamming.com/cc, a simple cloud service, using WiFi and the internet.
The box didn’t print very evenly and has a noticeable band around the side. Otherwise it turned out well.
I have a standard parametric box design that can be parameterized to handle any PCB. The PCB is fixed to the base using screws that fit into nurled nuts that are hot-pushed into the plastic holes. That works really well and is very simple to do. I need to get some pan-head screws rather than these countersunk screws.
I need to find a better way to pass a USB cable through the plastic shell. Have to look to see how the pros do it without a bunch more soldering of wires.
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| Base Station |
The cloud service produces graphs that look like this:
