Measure Soil Moisture with HARDWARIO IoT Kit

If you have trouble with your garden and all your crops this project can help you with a simple sensor that you can put straight into the soil, you will get data about the percentage of the moisture of the soil regularly. So you always know if you need to do some work or if you can save water.

1. Build hardware

You will need to buy all the things on the list or you can buy Soil Sensor Kit and you will have all you need as well. You will need to put all the modules together and connect the soil sensor as shown below. It is highly recommended to put all the components into some box with IP protection your device is safe from the environment. You can see it on another picture down below.

2. Flash firmware

• Download HARDWARIO Playground,
• If you buy Soil Sensor Kit it will come pre-flashed so you are done with this step.
• Otherwise, flash firmware to the Core Module that was made for this project. You will find in the Playground by name: bcf-radio-soil-sensor
• How to flash firmware is shown in the documentation.

3. Pair the Core Module

You need to pair the Core module with the Radio dongle that you are using, follow the instructions below to see how it is done.

• Connect your USB Radio Dongle to your computer.
• Open HARDWARIO Playground

• Click Start Pairing the LED on the dongle should start blinking
• Connect the device that you want to pair into your computer or insert the batteries.
• Wait for the device to appear in the table
• It should add the device with the Alias: soil-sensor:0

• After you did all this you can unplug the device from the computer and put the batteries in it. The next steps will be done on the computer, so you can leave the device and focus on the NODE-Red.

4. Make your flow

You can get temperature and moisture from your sensor you will need to make MQTT nodes in this format.

You need to follow this format: node/soil-sensor:0/soil-sensor/ID/temperature.

Where soil-sensor:0 is ID of the sensor that is shown in the previous step, ID is unique sensor ID you will be able to see that in the debug window in the playground. And temperature can be changed to moisture so you get the moisture of the soil.

Do not forget to hit "Deploy" in the top right corner to apply the changes.

You can see how to work with the gauges in my other project.

In the video below you can watch the full instructions on how to work with the sensor and some other integrations.

Summary

You can put this sensor into every pot that you have in your house or into your garden to many places.

You will not have to worry about your plants anymore and you will go work to your garden only when you will have to.

Feel free to ask any questions about this project.

• Visit HARDWARIO page on hackster.io for more interesting projects or go directly to their website
• Go to HARDWARIO documentation to learn more about their modules and other possibilities of the platform.
• Try more firmware from HARDWARIO Playground or write your own, it is easy to start.
• Because everything is Open source you can get all firmware on GitHub, get some inspiration and try to make your own applications.
• Get your own HARDWARIO Hub to replace your computer in this project so you have always access to your applications.
• Check out more applications that can be used with HARDWARIO IoT Kit in Integrations section.