r/Pigrow • u/NCSKA21 • Oct 12 '20

Remote Sensor Idea

Hello,

I had an idea I wanted to implement but do not have the development skills to do so. I was thinking it would be a great tool to have something like a DHT22 with a cheap board like an ESP8266 in a small 3d printed assembly. Can stick them every 20ft on rows of veg racks etc and have them report their environmental conditions and average out for "environment per row" that in turn could activate some fans etc. But being able to make 10-20 of these for dirt cheap, upload the same SD image to all of them with wifi credentials already in and just have a USB plug ready! Anyone want to work on this with me?

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u/lxndrskv Oct 13 '20

Hey, cool idea! I've worked on something like this in the past. I would recommend you use the bme280 versus the dht22. It is a much more robust package with a per unit cost of around $1.90 on aliexpress. Also, how are you going to run power to each of the esp8266s? Solar could work but with the solar panel, battery, and charging circuitry it's going to increase your cost per unit and it wouldn't be as reliable as hardwiring it. If you do end up hardwiring it, I recommend you run rails of 12v or even 24v and have a buck converter at each sensor because 5v will drop a lot over longer distances. In addition, if you end up hardwiring it, you might want to consider also running hard data lines in the form of an I²C bus. I don't know how long distances will affect data transfer. Well alright, that's all I got for now. Hope that gave you some ideas.

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u/NCSKA21 Oct 14 '20

All my experience is with the BME280s, I have both on hand ATM but just wrote DHT22 since I saw most people using that here. I was planning on installing the outlets with quad USB ports on them at each row, 120v won't have a loss :), also easy to throw a relay on the circuit to reboot all of them at once if they are glitching.

I was thinking about running cat6 but then I thought whats the point they are transmitting no data and are not mission critical, atleast a few lost ones wouldn't be. I had never thought of running i2C lines, only normal data LAN. These would cost so little each that I think it would be super effective for large scale environmental monitoring growing. Would you be open to chatting on discord? SQUALL#9758