ESP8266 soil moisture sensing gets dirty
helge wrote 07/30/2018 at 23:05 • 0 pointsWe know both the 555-based capacitive soil moisture sensing and the approach to "just stick an ESP8266 on it" to make a wireless sensor.
However the question needs to be asked why the antenna is always OUTSIDE the soil when the 2.4 GHz band lends itself so neatly to implementing microwave absorption measurements in transmission (between any two antennas).
Shouldn't it be possible to dial down transmit power and get soil water content from RSSI. As a bonus one might still be able to transmit to a regular wifi access point using the same antenna.
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I was wondering how seriously reflections and changes in the surrounding - or even competing radios on the same channel will interfere with the measurements.
I've since taken a step back and will be looking into measuring S parameters which unfortunately involves more RF lego. Waiting for a set of RF power meters to arrive.
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RSSI can be affected by many factors, so you’d get some spurious data.
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