Need clarification on soil-moisture build

[mrhutchinsonmn]

Now that I have my soil moisture properly presented to HA, I would like to ask for a little clarity on the build itself: https://www.mysensors.org/build/moisture

Instructions indicate D0 of the shown moisture sensor (which I am using) should be connected to D3 of the arduino board, yet the sketch indicates a person should be using pins D6 and D7 for outputs. It also says A0 and A1 can be used. The moisture sensor only has an A0 and D0 pin. If I follow what seems to be the instruction in the sketch, I connect A0 and D0 of the sensor to D6 and D7 of the arduino but this only gives me very low readings-from 0-2. (never rising above 2) when in moist soil and 0 when removed from the soil. The sketch indicates the following:

 0-10 Saturated Soil. Occurs for a day or two after irrigation
 *      10-20 Soil is adequately wet (except coarse sands which are drying out at this range)
 *      30-60 Usual range to irrigate or water (except heavy clay soils).
 *      60-100 Usual range to irrigate heavy clay soils
 *      100-200 Soil is becoming dangerously dry for maximum production. Proceed with caution.
 *

My readings seem to be the opposite of what is stated

If I connect to A0 and A1, instead my readings jump all over the place.

Would love to hear how others have this working properly and appreciate if the documentation could be updated to reflect a working solution.

[Peter Loeffler]

well, I am sorry for the following, but:

if you want to messure soil-moisture, then using these sensors is a very bad idea.
maybe you could get arround with corrosion on the two electrodes by changing the polarity. but you will always meassure electric conductivity. and conductivity is extremely influenced by the presence of salt (not only NaCl ) and some of the nutrients are basically salt.

therefore I strongly recommend using capacitive soil moisture sensors
(e.g. this one https://robu.in/product/capacitive-soil-moisture-sensor-v2-0/ )

there is also a rather good video describing how and why that works.
Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor V1.2 - Garden Test! – 10:59
— Gadget Reboot

[mrhutchinsonmn]

That is the direction I am going but this is the only tutorial I could find that used the NRF24L01+ radios to send data to Home Assistant. For now, I am just trying to get it to send accurate measurements and move to capacitive sensors as soon as I figure out how to send the data via NRF24L01+