Hi there! Reading the Watermark sensor is no easy task indeed. Took us a while to get accurate and reliable data out of these sensors.
First of all, take a look at the official documentation provided by Irrometer: https://www.irrometer.com/200ss.html
Especially the pseudo-AC excitation is very important and make sure you calibrate the readings using the soil temperature.
There's quite some off-the-shelf hardware on the market already. Look for a device that has a low power consumption so you can measure throughout the year, for example:
https://www.crodeon.com/blogs/news/connecting-a-watermark-sensor-to-the-cloud
Let me know if you have any more questions!
Are you still able to use the same analog phone plugged into the back of your modem? If so then it has to still use the same protocol, and I don't understand why the analog beacon wouldn't still work. It would just have to be on that same wire, not on the internet side of the modem. The modem is doing all of the translation in that case.
Or am I missing something? Did you have to get a new phone to use the new service?
I don't have a good answer for you @mimaret When I get to the point where I'm getting strange error messages, I bite the bullet and start from ground zero. Fortunately, with the RPi you just need a new SD card.
Start with a fresh copy of the Raspberry Pi OS. If you enable SSH (and WiFI) when you create the image, you can do everything headless (without keyboard-mouse-video) by running raspi-config via a remote terminal ( PuTTY ) If you enable VNC with raspi-config you can have access to the GUI.
Double check your radio wiring.
Don't have anything unnecessary plugged in.
Carefully follow the instructions
I've done this tedious process many times. My RPi's are 3B+ and Zero 2 W. Here's what I've encountered:
bad power supply
bad SD card
bad wiring
corrupt download
and, of course, more user errors than I care to think about!
I have not come across bad RPi ... no, not true! I had a Zero 2 W with a bad WiFi chip (common problem). Overcame that with a USB WiFi dongle.
Good luck! Let us know what you discover.
-OSD
@nagelc I'm thinking about making some kind of shelves with PJON built in. The shelves will have a wireless charger and with PJON I can communicate "Wireless". So on that shelf I can put some things like small candles, maybe a modified humidifier.
Things like that xd
@Tmaster I think it writes better code than a lot of code I've seen, and the documentation is a lot better. The latter, of course, is because most coders don't document.
some key elements:
good statement of work -- Purpose of the Code is key (did you write that? Good job!). This will guide the AI to write what you want.
descriptive variables
good documentation
code is independent of reading sensors up-to-down/down-to-up
I spent a couple hours analyzing, researching and writing and re-writing this and all I can say is that the AI didn't catch is, as far as I can see, if your sensors are too far apart or your magnet is too weak, you could get false readings.
You, being the author of AI directive, are responsible for for the code. The AI is just a tool.
I started my coding with assembly language, though at that time we still had to enter the binary on some machines (set 16 switches, then press commit). ForTran and COBOL were the first real high level languages and subsequent languages, pascal, c, java, etc. were improvements. AI is a quantum step. It's still coding, but you have to learn how to talk to the AI to get what you want.
Good project! Let us know how it turns out and if you had to tweak the code.
-OSD
