FLORA | Long Range Garden Monitoring System

ANNOUNCEMENT 

Thank you all for the support I have received over the past year. 

I really appreciate the comments and feedback through this forum and I fully intend to update my content here frequently with useful content as soon as they become available. However due to the format of this platform, it is quite difficult to present small yet important updates, therefore I am creating an Instagram page where I will post my content more regularly and also demonstrate more of the "behind-the-scenes" work that goes into creating my projects. 

You can access my Instagram page here, elektroThing (@elektrothing) • Instagram photos and videos.  For those of you who do not want to use Instagram, I am also launching my website, elektrothing.com, which will serve as the landing page for all things elektroThing. :) 

PROJECT UPDATE

And now for the fun part. 

I have been testing out FLORA over the summer months and I can confirm that it does work over the ESP-NOW protocol up to a distance of around 30m. Which should be fine for your house + garden. I have been able to set up the LoRa hardware with the ESP32 but have yet to run experiments over a larger distance - we might have to wait a few months for the sun too. 

Thus with the downtime, my plan over the next few months is to complete the following; 

1. Improve the SMPS design to boost the efficiencies further.
2. Design a 3D printable housing that has better airflow. 
3. Add connectors to the extra soil moisture sensor so that it can be "plug-and-plug".
4. Develop the firmware so that setup can be done "out of the box" or at least, easier - between sender and receiver modules. At the moment, it involved getting MAC Addresses as it is over ESP-NOW. 
5. Write the same firmware for LoRaWAN.

Do reach out if there is something on this list that you would like to help with. I am more than happy to send over a board and in return get some work off my shoulders.

Hi,

Just wanted to share some of the ThingSpeak IOT platform's capabilities and how it has been used for this project. 

ThingSpeak is powered by MATLAB which allows for easy data analysis and data viz. The visualizations can be updated in real-time as the data arrives which allows you to seek trends and create smart alerts. For FLORA I have done a basic moving averaged time series plot, 2 hours, 1 day, and 1-week window, & a boxplot to help view the distribution during the day. 

You can see the live plots through these two links; 

1. https://thingspeak.com/apps/matlab_visualizations/475925?height=auto&width=auto
2. https://thingspeak.com/apps/matlab_visualizations/476046?height=auto&width=auto

Hope this shows how FLORA can leverage existing IOT platforms to help inform better decisions and actions.

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.