Project Update

Over the past few months, I have been writing up the firmware for FLORA as well as identifying and trying to resolve the issues with the board. I am happy with what it is capable of doing for now however, there are still some niggling issues that need to be overcome for it to be able to perform as described. 

The setup how the FLORA units are shown below. Using two usings, one as a receiver and the other as the "boots on the ground". The unit placed outside is powered solely by solar power and can read from its sensors and relay them back to the receiver. The intention is to leverage LoRaWAN to increase operational range and broaden its use cases. However, for simplicity, the current setup uses ESP's very own ESP-NOW communication protocol that performs well up to 50m. Over ESP-NOW, the receiver can read the temperature, humidity, and soil moisture levels from the unit in the garden.

The data is then presented over a simple GUI that can be accessed over the WiFi network by typing in the IP address of the unit - e.g. 192.168.1.111::8080. Each data point is also sent to the cloud using Thingspeak's services to further analyze and visualize the data. This could then be used to trigger some sort of action to the user such as sending an email/SMS to rectify an issue in the garden. 

Future plans

• Enable hardware capability to open/close valves to automatically irrigate.
• Create an app with configurable moisture and environmental thresholds to alert the user. 
• Update mechanical design for more accurate weather monitoring that can be fed back to OpenWeather.