DIY: Solar Powered Node for Garden Monitoring
Garinger Gardens is a garden and education center in Charlotte, NC. Romell Sessoms and Brit Pair recently built a solar powered node for garden monitoring. This solar-powered, Arduino-based sensor system to monitor air temperature, humidity, pressure, light intensity and soil moisture in the hoop houses. You can find the full tutorial here, including the Arduino sketch.
The node feeds the data to a live dashboard via cellular broadband and looks something like this.
The system uses relatively little power. It draws 3mA during sleep mode and 35mA during transmission (about every 5 minutes). The 2 Watt Solar Kit manages to keep the system powered except in instances of week-long clouds and rain that we experienced earlier this winter.
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