I thought I'd post a few notes about the automation experiments and data collection I've been working on around the farm for the past year or so.

This was my first attempt at a greenhouse temperature monitoring system. I used some cheap Arduino-compatible devices with built in LoRa radios. LoRa is a low-power, low-bandwidth radio system for sending small data packets over longer distances.

Rather than piece together a power solution and enclosure, I installed the boards into solar night lights and used the light's battery and solar panel to run the circuit. By using low-power sleep mode between updates, they'll run about four days on a full battery if there's no sun to charge them. With even just a couple sunny days a week, they run indefinitely.

I attached a DS18B20 temperature sensor to the board, and they send the temperature every 15 seconds to the base station, which is another LoRa-equipped device (inside a 3D-printed case), that also has a tiny LED screen and wifi. The screen displays the temperature and it connects to wifi and makes the temperature readings available to my server, which can alert me if the temperature in the greenhouses gets too high or low.

It all works great, but I've recently been moving to integrating everything into HomeAssistant to avoid having to program everything from scratch, and giving me more options for alerts and controlling things like fans and valves (and even cool features like voice control). I'll post more on that system later.

I'm still using this original system as a backup while I work on my HomeAssistant setup, and it works much better than I ever thought it would. I built it two years ago, and it's been problem-free once I got the initial bugs worked out of my code.

#grownostr #automation #homesteading