imsolidstate » Moisture http://www.imsolidstate.com Always improving things... Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:32:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Moisture Meter for Plants http://www.imsolidstate.com/archives/506 http://www.imsolidstate.com/archives/506#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:19:47 +0000 imsolidstate http://www.imsolidstate.com/?p=506 My wife suggested to me the idea of a visual indication for the soil moisture level in a houseplant (that is, before the brown leaves indication). We hadn’t seen anything like it in stores. So I made a prototype which worked quite nicely, and then we found that they were already available online through retailers like Amazon. Here’s the prototype I made:

Moisture 016

It has two probes at one end that get inserted into the soil, and the LED then flashes either red, yellow, or green depending on the moisture content of the soil. It all runs on one AAA battery for about a month, but that could be improved by reducing the flash time and ADC sampling. The code for the prototype flashes the LED every second or two and samples every time.

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