I’m a vegetable/cut flower farmer in CT and I’m working with USDA NRCS on a new irrigation system. My contract includes monitoring soil moisture in my high tunnels and field so that I can irrigate efficiently. I am obliged to record soil moisture levels and water use, and would like to use FarmOS v2 to store/manage this data. I could manually enter this data as observation logs, but I’m wondering if anyone has tried to automatically capture this data from a soil moisture sensor (I’m considering the Watermark sensors). Is anyone using a soil moisture sensor with a data stream in v2? Same question for a water meter as I need to record water use. Thanks so much for sharing your experiences with this.
Observation logs are a good way to record manual measurements. I would probably have an Observation log with a standard Quantity measurement. As long as you use consistent quantity measure/units/labels you can easily filter down to those measurements in the /quantites list.
Alternatively, you could use v2’s new concept of Data Streams (Data Streams | farmOS), which are attached to Sensor assets. The “basic” data stream type opens up an endpoint with a public/private key you can use to POST data to it from a sensor. You would need to write some kind of script on something like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino to read from the sensor and push to farmOS, but then it would be fully automated!
As for irrigation logs, the convention I tend to use is an Input log with a quantity describing how much water or how long I left the drip on, basically. You can make that as precise as you want.
I know others have done a lot more with sensors than me, so I’d also be curious to hear!
What are you planning on using for sensor nodes? I’m using Arduino nodes, rfm95 LoRa radios and Raspberry Pi’s as gateways to build a farm sensor network spread across a couple of separate farm blocks. My network is managed by Home Assistant and connects to farmOS via Node Red. The Arduino’s and Pi gateways run sketches from mysensors.org
Although I’m using Home Assistant to manage the senors it’s optional as Node Red is capable of connecting the gateways/sensors to farmOS.
Don’t want to seem too nit-picky on my first post, but the Data Streams info is at: Data Streams | farmOS -an underscore instead of a dash. See there, I got too much into it already!
@Farmer-Ed - thanks for sharing a description of your sensor infrastructure. I’ve just started checking out mysensors.org to see if I can use that for the irrigation measurements. So far, it appears that the soil moisture sensor may not report back results in centibars or some other measurement. Please correct me if I’m wrong about this. The Watermark sensors I’m looking at can be connected to the company’s data logger, and I can use their Windows app to download the raw data and then upload to FarmOS. However, if anyone is using another sensor system that will provide similar measurements of soil moisture in the field at different depths, I’d be happy to consider it. Thanks for your help.
No Problem @macarius, I’m sure it can although it may not exist in the example sketches. There is some discussion within their forums on the Watermark Sensors. Search | MySensors Forum
The soil sensor in their examples is a far more basic sensor, however it is their mesh LoRa radio network which is reliable and can be built using cheap components that interests me. They have a wide range of sensors within their examples and usually anything they don’t specifically cover can be adapted from one of they do. But there is a level of tinkering with code that may not appeal to everyone.
I am looking to replace Wifi network with Lora Wan network to manage a greenhouse sensor for moisture, humidity, and temperature, am using now an open source IOT solution based on thingsboard CE under raspberry pi 4 with four raspberry pi z w based on wifi network with FaromOs 2.0 beta 3
if anyone has an idea about hardware and software needed to deploy such Lora network,
I am looking if anyone has an idea about NPK sensor to measure Soil Nutrien.
He set up essentially the same installation for my greenhouse (minus the NPK element), and has done such installations elsewhere, i know, including Wolf’s Neck in Maine.
Interesting project, mate; keep us posted as to how it goes! /w
Are you looking for a private LoRa network or LoRaWAN from a provider?
For my sensor network I use RFM95 LoRa radios with Arduino, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi’s and code from MySensors.org.
Also the ESP32 board, but not a great choice for battery nodes with the MySensors.org sketches as they don’t support the proper sleep mode for ESP32, but fine for USB powered sensors or actuators.
I’ve used Home Assistant for my IOT controller but all the above will work with lots of other software.
