Sensor network to monitor a rooftop garden

Guys,

I want to develop a wireless monitoring system for a rooftop garden. The parameters that I intend to monitor are,

  • Soil moisture content
  • Soil temperature
  • Ambient temperature (above the leaf) and RH
  • Soil PH value

I plan to use arduino board for each node (with Zigbee communication module) and another arduino board at the coordinator position to communicate with the PC. Do you have any ideas (may be from your past projects) that may help me? This is the first time I'm going to use arduino boards, so I'm not really familiar with its pros and cons for this kind of an application.

Also any general comment will also be very useful.

Thank you very much,
Buddi

Hi,

I did few of measuring station using Arduino board with different sensors.

For temperature i like to use 1-Wire DS18B20 sensors, no meter where you measure i got relay precise results, plus you will need only one digital pin for few of them.

For pH, i use one self created sensor, without precise results.

For air humidity I use AM2301 sensor and I am very satisfied with working parameters.

For soil humidity I also use few different sensors but all of them measure resistance, what dissolve one of electrode after some time, so right now i work on capacitance sensor.

Hope that help.

Regards,
Dubravko

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Here's a Temp-Humidity example on http://arduino-info.info
http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/PROJECT-Temp-Humidity-Display

Here's a soil moisture sensor that reverses polarity to help solve the electrolysis problem:
http://gardenbot.org/howTo/soilMoisture/#The_local_circuit_-_simple_voltage

(H-bridge chips/modules here: http://goo.gl/WcY5h )

DISCLAIMER: Mentioned stuff from my own shop...

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Dear Dubravko and Terry,

Thank you very much for your suggestions. I will definitely try DS18B20 sensors and DHT11 as shown in the example. I also want to try Terry's example of soil moisture sensor as well. Thanks a bunch for both of you :slight_smile:

Regards,
Buddi

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SnJDK:
For pH, i use one self created sensor, without precise results.

Dubravko, How did you create the pH sensor?

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