💬 Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor
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Beautiful work
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Hi great design... If I can suggest one improvement, it would be to burn a minicore bootloader and set BOD to 1.8V so that the batteries can last longer.
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@Puneit-Thukral Thanks. I am not quite sure, so correct me please if I am wrong, but I think I am already using the MiniCore bootloader with platformIO. Or do I need to configure to explicitly use the MiniCore bootloaders? Also I have set BOD to disabled as I read somewhere that no BOD can also save battery.
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@Puneit-Thukral but will the peripherals still work at that level? No use to lower the BOD if radio/security/sensors stop working at a higher voltage.
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@Anticimex That was also my thinking behind that. According to the datasheet the ATmega328P works reliably down to 2.4V when using 8MHz.
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@Ron @Anticimex The radio stops at 1.9V.. so I think its fair to do a BOD of 1.8V.
I used arduinoAsISP to burn bootloader and this is my platformio.ini
[env:program_via_ArduinoISP] platform = atmelavr framework = arduino ; Serial bootloader protocol upload_protocol = custom ; Serial upload port upload_port = /dev/cu.* ; Get upload baud rate defined in the fuses_bootloader environment upload_speed = 19200 board_build.f_cpu = 8000000L board_hardware.oscillator = internal board_hardware.uart = uart0 board_hardware.bod = 1.8v board_hardware.eesave = yes board_hardware.ckout = no upload_flags = -C ; use "tool-avrdude-megaavr" for the atmelmegaavr platform /Users/puneit/Nextcloud/PlatformIO/bootloader/tool-avrdude/avrdude2.conf -p $BOARD_MCU -P $UPLOAD_PORT -b $UPLOAD_SPEED -c stk500 upload_command = avrdude $UPLOAD_FLAGS -U flash:w:$SOURCE:i
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@Puneit-Thukral yes but for full/specified function, atsha, atmega and any sensor circuitry also need to be operational at that level.
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@Puneit-Thukral When I tested a recent node the radio was presenting to the GW all the way down to 1.64V - so it is always worth trying to see if it works for you or not (ebyte red module).
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Nice work @Ron . Thinking about getting some of these for my plants.
Any experienced issues, or the PCB and components works good?
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@sundberg84 said in Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor:
Nice work @Ron . Thinking about getting some of these for my plants.
Any experienced issues, or the PCB and components works good?I had the first prototype running for about 2-3 months and did not experience any issues. The next thing on my todo list is to get an estimation on the total battery lifetime. I would assume that it will be quite good as I did not notice any significant drop in battery voltage over that time. I will post my measurements in the corresponding GitHub question as soon as I have some time.
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@Ron said in Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor:
@Puneit-Thukral Thanks. I am not quite sure, so correct me please if I am wrong, but I think I am already using the MiniCore bootloader with platformIO. Or do I need to configure to explicitly use the MiniCore bootloaders? Also I have set BOD to disabled as I read somewhere that no BOD can also save battery.
hi
I'm not sure, but I believe I'm already using the MiniCore bootloader with platformIO. Please tell me if I'm incorrect. Is it necessary to set the MiniCore bootloaders explicitly?