Published September 1, 2022 © CC BY-NC

Dempsey - Over the pond (Using the S2104)

With our sensors in place, we can now start to use some of the data to help create the haven that Dempsey is attempting to manufacture.

BeginnerFull instructions provided6 minutes709

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Seeed Studio SenseCAP S2104 - LoRaWAN Soil Moisture and Temperature Sensor

Seeed Studio SenseCAP M1 LoRaWAN Indoor Gateway - EU868

Seeed Studio SenseCAP Outdoor Enclosure

Software apps and online services

Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Seeed Studio SenseCAP - Mate

Seeed Studio SenseCAP - Hotspot App

Helium Wallet App

Story

Dempsey’s Garden even in it’s current state, is a place of peace.

I visited last week with a couple of tools that the SenseCAP team have been kind enough to send us, to aid us in our journey of simplifying some of the technical aspects that go into maintaining a healthy garden, or creating sustenance for a community.

Setting up the S2104

The weather hasn’t helped us in our goals. The UK, like other parts of the world at the moment, is experiencing a drought. Dempsey and I spoke about this, as he tore through the fencing he was recycling, to lay a bed for the mounds of soil and fertiliser he’d recently won in a pub, during a visit to Ireland.

Dempsey remains firm in his belief; that a wobble in the earth’s axis is causing the planet’s magnetic poles to drift; he goes on to explain how the earth’s magnetosphere is weakening and talks like a prophet of his fears for the land and its inhabitants.

His words lingered.. before the silence was shattered by the passion passing through his arms as another bed of steel was sheared from the fence it once was before.

Dempsey made these planters by hand

The SenseCAP S2104 that we have set up in Dempsey’s Garden has now been giving us stable readings for the past few weeks. The purpose of wanting to capture this data I can now share in more detail.

SenseCAP Mate

In the garden, Dempsey is tending to a wide variety of different fruits, vegetables and natural remedies; to wain off his reliance and those whose lives he’s able to touch from the conglomerates and supermarkets; responsible for some of the growing climate and socio-economic crises through their desire to broaden their bank sheets and annual reports.

Data from the sense.seeed.cc dashboard

It’s reassuring to find corners of the internet where the desire to raise humanity up a level can still be found. Through initiatives like Hacksters IoT into the Wild contest(supported by Seeed Studio), where as well as $14, 000’s worth of prizes being offered to the smartest solutions; we’ve also seen an unprecedented number of devices sent to those willing to participate.

https://www.seeedstudio.com/iot_into_the_wild.html

We wanted to find a way whereby Dempsey could automate some of the more niche and repetitive tasks from his list by using some of the features he’s implemented into the Garden. It’s far enough away from civilisation that we can’t hijack a public WiFi network and being a governmental-pariah means associating with any sort of telephone number or ID is quite far down his list, so attaching a sim-card and grabbing the data via mobile through the Sense Dashboard isn’t going to be an option either.

The raised beds do a great job of draining excess water and keeping slugs away!

For our use-case, the Helium network is a perfect candidate. There’s a small cost associated with using the network but the cost is negligible in the grand scheme of things.. We’re taking readings every hour and transmitting only a tiny amount of data. The cost of this data will be covered by the Helium Tokens(HNT) that we’re receiving in exchange for providing coverage for the network, using a SenseCAP M1 Hotspot & SenseCAP PoE Splitter, which we’ve setup nearby in a SenseCAP Outdoor Enclosure. This allows us to move our hotspot outdoors, higher up and permits us to exchange data with other hotspots nearby.

SenseCAP M1, SenseCAP PoE Splitter & SenseCAP Outdoor Enclosure

I’ve blogged before about the calm that Dempsey brings. He’s a juxtaposition to the chaos I find myself wielding when a soldering iron lands in my hands and that couldn’t be more apparent than during my recent visits to the workbench where my attempts to manhandle the Seeed Xiao devices has resulted in more than one emergence of the magical smoke that components seem to emit in my presence.

Whilst I wait in anticipation for the SenseCraft launch I’ve taken some time to cobble together an example of the API data presented by the Sense dashboard, in order to capture the sensor measurements once they’ve landed in the console. This way Dempsey can access the data more-easily from any device with a traditional internet connection, whilst we devise a strategy to automate the watering of his plants.

The water-butt, where we'll be pumping water from

I’ve included the code for this below, but it’s still very-much a work in progress and I’d encourage you to make your own amendments and to try the code out yourself, to see what improvements you can make.

Be sure to share your creations in the comments and with Dempsey on his social media and we look forward to sharing more with you over the pond, soon.

https://www.instagram.com/overthepond.uk/ (Dempsey)

// Set $APIKey, $APIValue & $DevEUI
function getSoilTemp () {
      var soilTemp = "https://sensecap.seeed.cc/openapi/view_latest_telemetry_data?device_eui=$DevEUI&measurement_id=4102&channel_index=1";
      var creds = btoa("$APIKey:$APIValue");
// Get Data     
      fetch (soilTemp, {
        headers: {
          "Authorization": `Basic ${creds}`
        }
      })
// Error Handling
      .then((result) => {
        if (result.status != 200) { throw new Error("Bad Server Response"); }
        return result.text();
      })
// Parse Data
      .then((response) => {
        document.getElementById("Temperature").innerHTML = response;
        $.getJSON( response, {
            measurement_value: "",
            tagmode: "any",
            format: "json"
          })
      })
// Error Handling
      .catch((error) => { console.log(error); });
    }