At any time desired to measure soil dampness? Prevalent “soil moisture meter module arduino raspberry compatible free of charge shipping” PCBs may possibly deceive you with their ascetic seems to be. These days, [Raphael (@rbaron_)] is listed here to teach us (Twitter, unrolled) what it takes to create a soil-embedded sensor that can basically survive speak to with a plant.
As the picture may possibly hint, waterproofing is of paramount importance, and soldermask doesn’t pretty minimize it. Raphael describes his journey of figuring out techniques and coatings that would previous, beginning from only utilizing nail polish, and ending with the current choice – a rotisserie-like product that rotates sensors as the coating used to them dries, mitigating a selected variety of structural failure observed lengthy-expression. With lots of illustrative pics and even a video clip of the rotisserie gadget in motion, you are going to promptly find out matters that took time and exertion for Raphael to determine out.
This isn’t the initial time Raphael shares some style battlefield stories and classes with us – he has taught us about general capacitive moisture sensor concepts, far too! If that passions you, we have protected fairly a several moisture sensor patterns, from low-priced but hardy two-nails layouts to flip-dot-outfitted types, and some of us take the industrial designs and upgrade them!
We thank [Chaos] for sharing this with us!
When I started working on my soil moisture sensor, I had little thought about how harsh an surroundings the soil genuinely is. In this 🧵, neat failure modes & answers when sticking electronics in the ground: pic.twitter.com/ROGvLSPgk9
— Raphael (@rbaron_) February 9, 2022