Soil moisture sensor hookup guide

How do I hook up the soil moisture sensor?

Our original Soil Moisture Sensor is pretty straightforward when it comes to hookup. There are only three pins to connect: VCC, GND, and SIG. You need to supply power to VCC and GND. We recommend not powering the sensor constantly to prevent corrosion of the probes (more on this in a bit).

What voltage is the soil moisture sensor powered from?

Note that in the code, we are powering the soil moisture sensor with a digital pin on the RedBoard, not directly from 3.3V or 5V. Since this is a 5V device, the digital IO pins have a HIGH voltage of ~5V.

What is the best sensor for soil moisture?

SparkFun Soil Moisture Sensor SEN-13322 The SparkFun Soil Moisture Sensor is a simple breakout for measuring the moisture in soil and similar materials. The soil moisture sensor is pretty st…

Do I need to calibrate my soil moisture sensor?

To get any sort of useful data out of your Soil Moisture Sensor, it is advised that you calibrate it to whatever soil you plan to monitor. Different types of soil can affect the sensor, and you may get different readings from one composition tot he next.

How does a soil moisture sensor work?

A typical Soil Moisture Sensor consist of two components. A two legged Lead, that goes into the soil or anywhere else where water content has to be measured. This has two header pins which connect to an Amplifier/ A-D circuit which is in turn connected to the Arduino. The Amplifier has a Vin, Gnd, Analog and Digital Data Pins.

How to hook up moisture sensors to a microcontroller?

Hooking up your moisture sensors is very simple. There are just three pins that you have to connect: GND, SIG, and VCC. You have to power the GND and VCC while the SIG’s analog signal that you will join ADC pins on your choice microcontroller.

Do I need a soil moisture sensor for a smart garden?

If youre building a Smart Garden that waters plants automatically and give you the readings of the wetness of the soil, then you will definitely need a Soil Moisture Sensor. In this Instructable, Ill show you how to interface the Soil Moisture Sensor to an Arduino Uno and read the values on a Serial Monitor.

How does a moisture meter work?

The two probes allow the electric current to pass through the soil and, according to its resistance, measures the moisture level of the soil. When there is more water, the soil conducts more electricity, which means that the resistance will be less.

What soil moisture sensor should I use?

We opted to use the v1.2 capacitive soil moisture sensor in this guide because it’s cheap and easily available on the internet. You should also get this kind of sensor instead of any other soil resistance measuring sensors that may be affected by fertilizers, thereby causing the probes to corrode.

Why do we need to calibrate soil sensors?

With water occupying up to 60% of certain soils by volume, depending on the specific porosity of the soil, calibration must be carried out in every environment to ensure accurate prediction of water content [more on this here ]. Luckily, the accuracy of measurement devices has been increasing while the cost of the sensors have been decreasing.

How does the moisture sensors work?

This sensor is consists of mainly two parts, one is Sensing Probs and another one is the Sensor Module. The probes allow the current to pass through the soil and then it gets the resistance value according to moisture value in soil.

How is soil moisture measured?

Soil moisture can be measured using a variety of different techniques: gravimetric, nuclear, electromagnetic, tensiometric, hygrometric, among others [read about the specifics types of soil moisture sensors here ]. The technique explored here uses a gravimetric technique to calibrate a capacitive-type electromagnetic soil moisture sensor.