I apologise for my English in advance, I'm Spanish.
So, I have never used Arduino before but i'm doing a research project in school (I'm 18) and I thought Arduino was the most optimal solution, but I need a little bit of help with what I have to buy or what would be more useful to me.
The project consists in making a humidity sensor for soil that wirelessly transmits the values to a phone, computer, etc. As I said I have never used Arduino before and I need guidance in what to buy, also if you can give me programming advice or tips I would appreciate it.
So there is the FIRST project to do. Fix that first by actually getting an Arduino board, power supply and a breadboard ad wires. Think of a KIT from a vendor and learn how to use it by playing with the sample programs that come with the IDE, the integrated development environment. Only then move on to a humidity sensor and only then to wireless connections.
Thank you a lot for taking the time to respond me.
So I was thinking the same but I have trouble choosing which exact board I should buy, because I have to complete my project by February so I don't want to buy more than one board if it isn't estrictly necessary because they are not very cheap. If you could hand me some advice on which board get you would be helping me a lot.
If you could give me a link on which I should buy it would be perfect, I don't really understand the differences between all of them so if you help me I would appreciate it a lot.
Go with Node MCU. you are going to report mositure (it is not humidity but the moisture when it is about soil) values to web. Uno or Nano boards will not help you a lot for this as you said that you want to buy only one board.
Buy soil moisture probe module also which provides analog voltage with respect to moisture level.
it will be enough for you to start.
I have another question if you could solve it. If I just want a moisture sensor that it's data is sent to somewhere remotely, would that be very difficult to program? Because I tried to learn the basics and it doesn't seem to, but if it would be very complicated maybe I should look for an alternative out of the Arduino hardware.
Arduino is the most simple plateform as you will find tons of examples. it is very easy to program if you have little knowledge of C langauge. Dont worry. just start from somewhere, you will love it.
is that the complete project? I see too many projects where once it is operational new requirements are added
in particular you need to decide on the communications requirements as that will determine the microcontroller
if WiFi an ESP8266 as suggested by @PaulRB would work OK
if you require Bluetooth classic or BLE (e.g. to communicate with a smartphone app) go for a ESP32
I would suggest you use Blynk. You can sign up for a free account and you will get an android app which allows you to design your phone app and lots of example Arduino code which you can adapt to display your sensor readings.
Bluetooth would be preferablem so I should choose the ESP32, right? Then the Bluetooth components would be already integrated? I then would only need to buy the sensors and program them and the communications?
you could run a webserver on a WiFi enabled device (e.g. ESP8266 or ESP32) - remote devices (laptop, smartphones, tablets, etc) could connect a web client to it and display the sensor data - are you assuming WiFi is available in the area when the microcontroller and sensor are? - will it be connected to the internet?
an alternative is to use Bluetooth or BLE and implement a smart phone app to read the sensor data - a more diffiult task in that you have to implement ESP32 code and the smartphone code - implementing smartphone apps is not simple even using a tool such as MIT app inventor
how far away from the microcontroller/sensor could a user be? e.g. within a few metres or 100's of killometres
this is why projects start with a requirements specification
The sensor would be next to me at the presentation so it isn't estrictly necessary to be capable to be very far away but THEORETICALLY the sensor would be kilometers away from you so it should be able to transmit data at that distance. But if it is a lot more complicated I prefere the easy way because it ins't a DEFINING thing in the presentation that would be tested or anything, it's a school project.
If there is WiFi internet access where the sensor is located and WiFi or 3G/4G/5G internet access where you are kilometers away, then no problem. If there is no WiFi or internet access, that's a much more difficult problem.
