Seeking advice for board and sensors to use

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello, Arduino community,

I aimed to develop a school project for a remote monitoring system for farmer owners to monitor the health and well-being status of their animals. The system will utilize various sensors to gather data on environmental conditions within the barn as well as individual animal activity. I am seeking guidance on which board and sensors would be best suited for this project. (Need to consider battery consumption and size since I want to mount the device on the animal, so I don’t want to use something overkill) The target cost for the entire setup is approximately $100, seeking a balance between cost and accuracy of the sensor, also the ease of setting up.

Here's a brief overview of my project:

  1. Environmental Monitoring (Install at each barn):
  • Air quality
  • Light
  • Temperature
  • Humidity
  1. Individual Animal Monitoring (Mounted on the animal):
  • Temperature
  • Motion
  • Heart rate

I need to order these sensors from online so I hope to avoid wasting money on purchasing the wrong board or sensors. Thank you for any guidance you can provide in advance!

2

to acquire data from remote sensors I suggest you use LoRa radio peer-to-peer communications
also a powerful modern host microcomputer such as the ESP32
I would recommend a module with the microcontroller and LoRa on board, e.g. HELTEC V3 or the TTGO LoRa32 SX1276 OLED which reduces wiring between modules which are a cause of poor connections and system failures
you need to draw up a requirements specification

you may well have more than one project!

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3

Sorry I cannot answer that accurately without more information. Everything you want to measure can be done but what tolerance does the sensors need to be. What range are they to measure? What is the cost target? You can spend several hundred dollars for a temperature sensor or less then a buck. What are the environmental conditions the equipment will be operating in. Put together a rough schematic showing sensors, and proposed parts.

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4

Hi Horace, thank you for your prompt response. Regarding the environmental monitoring setup, do you recommend using LoRa as well? Actually I was considering that since it's just a school project, perhaps connecting it over WiFi for demonstration purposes would suffice. Additionally, do you have any suggestions for batteries suitable for the remote setup?

5

Hello Gilshultz, thank you for your response, apologize for overlooking this aspect. Basically, I am seeking a balance between cost and temperature accuracy for the project. The target cost for the entire setup is approximately $100 at maximum. The systems will be operating within room temperature conditions.

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6

that would be OK - you can test the concept using WiFi (the ESP32 has builtin WiFi, Bluetooth Classic and BLE) and mention in your report that in a real situation LoRa could be used to give the range require
I assume you are looking at remote sensor(s) reporting to a base station - have a look at ESP-NOW

for the barn sensors look at bme280-arduino-ide-pressure-temperature-humidity and veml6040-color-sensor - both work OK with a ESP32

7

Thank you for the suggestions, what if I want to embed the sensors and ESP32 into a box or smth, and there are so many variant models of ESP32 available, which one do you recommend?

8

in the main I tend to use ESP32 WROOM-32 38-pin Development Board cost about £7 on ebay in UK
be careful not to put the sensors in a box close to the microcontroller - you will end up measuring the microcontroller temperature

9

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