Wireless Soil Moisture Sensors - Irrigation Control

Wireless Soil Moisture Sensors Control Irrigation & Nutrient Flow

wireless soil moisture sensors can operate for over a year on coin cell battery

The GrowerNode™ G.R.O.W.S.™ system uses wireless soil moisture sensors that also monitor temperature, light levels, fertilizer concentration, and battery conditions. The G.R.O.W.S.™ system is an acronym for the following:

G.R.O.W.S:
GrowerNode
Realtime
Optimal
Wireless
Sensors

Wireless Soil Sensor Data is Forwarded Over the Internet

wireless soil sensor data is forwarded via wifi over the Internet

These soil monitoring sensors use the relatively new BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) protocol for digital radio transmission, and we have waited a long time for sensors that can operate for over a year on a single coin cell battery! The battery life does depend on how often you wake these sensors up to poll the data, but if you only need readings every few hours the battery life will be greatly extended (and yes, they do report battery percentage remaining).

So what is the downside for these sensors? In a word, it is RANGE.

These soil sensors are only good for about 60 feet (outdoors, clear line of sight), so we have developed a unit we call the "Collector" that receives the data from a local cluster of sensors, then forwards that data via your WiFi router to any destination you desire, including our Node-RED online cloud server.

The G.R.O.W.S.™ System "Collector" Unit

the collector aggregates clusters of soil moisture sensor data and forwards the data via WiFi

The fault-tolerant Collector has a built in web server with a menu-driven system for easy access that you can see on your phone, tablet or laptop (ie. any browser enabled device).

It also has a built-in OLED display that conveys important information. This unit also has an optional solar powered battery unit that is capable of operating this unit indefinitely, but you can also use the AC power supply if you have grid power available.

See Your Data on a Local PC, Phone, or Tablet

soil moisture sensor data displayed on a Node-RED dashboard running on a Raspberry Pi

The destination can be a local computer screen (e.g. Raspberry Pi computer, or phone, or tablet). It is entirely up to you where the data is displayed, but we are big fans of the Node-RED system that is part of the standard pre-installed setup on a Raspberry Pi computer (as seen in the above example).

See Your Data on the Cloud

Node-RED can also be run on an external cloud based system (e.g. Digital Ocean). We will be providing tutorials and scripts for the setup of a local Node-RED installation running on a Raspberry Pi, as well as instructions for setting up a Node-RED account on the Digital Ocean cloud to display your data.