okyang/is-my-soil-moist

a project to monitor my soil moisture using influx db

Soil Moisture Sensor

This project just collects moisture data of your soil to help you better take care of your plants.

Below shows how data gets transferred from the soil sensor to Influx Data. Influx data will serve both as part of the middleware layer that hosts all the data and also the application layer to help users interact with the data via its dashboard feature.

graph LR
    A(Soil Sensor) --> |Data| C(Hive Public MQTT Broker)
    C --> D(MQTT Forwarder)
    E(InfluxDB)

    subgraph Wio Terminal
        A
    end
    subgraph The Cloud
        C
        E
    end
    subgraph Raspberry Pi Server
        D
    end
    D --> E

🙋‍♂️ If you want to host your own MQTT broker on the Raspberry Pi, just refer to the appendix section below

Table of Contents

• Soil Moisture Sensor
  • Features
  • Materials Needed
  • Tools
  • Pre-requisites
  • Steps
    • 1 - Create a InfluxData Account
    • 2 - Setup Config file for WIO Terminal
    • 2 - Upload code to WIO Terminal
    • 3 - Run Python MQTT Forwarder Code
  • Appendix
    • Install a MQTT Broker on the Raspberry Pi
  • References

Features

• Capture Soil Moisture % using a moisture sensor

• Collects and Soil Moisture telemetry to Influx Data

• Display Moisture % on Wio Terminal Display

Materials Needed

• Wio Terminal Microcontroller
• Grove Moisture Sensor

Tools

• Laptop or Computer

Pre-requisites

1. Visual Studio Code

2. Platformio IDE Extension on Visual Studio Code

Steps

1 - Create a InfluxData Account

Based off of instructions from Random Nerd Tutorials

1. Create a influx data cloud account: InfluxDB Cloud

   

2. Select where to save your data

   

3. Select the free plan

   

4. Create a Bucket.

   On the left side panel, click Load Data then click Buckets

   

   Then click the Create Bucket button on the right

   

   You'll give your bucket a name then click on the Create button ?��

   

5. Collect the influx DB credentials

   Go to Sources then scroll down and click Python

   

   Copy your token from the Tokens section and other information listed below from the Initialize Client Section

   • INFLUX_TOKEN

   • INFLUX_ORG

   • INFLUX_URL

   • INFLUX_BUCKET

     

2 - Setup Config file for WIO Terminal

1. Copy template.h file as config.h in the same parent folder

   cd <path_to_repo>/is-my-soil-moist/soil_moisture_terminal/src/
   cp template.h config.h

   

2. Replace the following values in your config.h file with the appropriate ones

   • <YOUR_WIFI_ID>

   • <YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD>

   • <YOUR_GUID>

   

2 - Upload code to WIO Terminal

1. Connect your Wio Terminal to your Computer with a USB-C Cable

2. Turn on your Wio Terminal

3. Hit the upload button on Platform IO

   

3 - Run Python MQTT Forwarder Code

1. Clone the repo

   git clone 

2. Install the following libraries

   pip3 install

3. Run the following code

   python3

Refer the the appendix section for a great time

Appendix

Install a MQTT Broker on the Raspberry Pi

If you want to use your own MQTT Broker hosted on the Raspberry Pi instead of the public mosquitto

. broker.

1. First install

   sudo apt get update
   sudo apt install mosquitto mosquitto-clients
   sudo reboot

2. Test your installation

   sudo systemctl enable mosquitto

3. Edit the mosquitto.conf file

   sudo nano /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf

   Replace

   include_dir /etc/mosquitto/conf.d
   

   with

   allow_anonymous true
   listener 1883
   

4. Restart mosquitto service.

   sudo systemctl restart mosquitto

   The configuration should be applied and the broker will listen on port 1883.

5. To test if you are able to publish/subscribe to your MQTT Broker. Use another computer connected to the same local network.

   sudo apt install mosquitto-clients

   Subscribe to a topic in one terminal window

   mosquitto_sub  -h <raspberry_pi_ip_address> -p 1883 -v -t test/message

   Publish to the topic in another terminal window. Replace <raspberry pi ip address> with your rasp pi ip address

   mosquitto_pub -h <raspberry_pi_ip_address> -t test/message -m 'Hello World!'

   You should be able to see a response from the subscribe terminal window! This was my output

   test/message Hello World!

If you're running into trouble with the test above. you may be experiencing some firewall issues. You can refer to this stack overflow post: Stack Overflow - mosquito server refuses connections .

References

• Random Nerd Tutorials | esp32 InfluxDB - quick guide for how to use influxdb cloud

• PubSub Client API Documentation - Documentation on the PubSub Client used in the PlatformIO Environment

• IoT-For-Beginners/app.py at main · microsoft/IoT-For-Beginners · GitHub - A free Microsoft Course on IoT Basic Concepts. The lessons here also used the Wio Terminal and has helped me a lot with setting up the code.

• HIVE MQTT Arduino PubsubClient - Resource in setting up a MQTT Client with Arduino

• HIVE MQTT Python Client - Resource in setting up a MQTT Client with Python

• IoT4 Beginners - Install MQTT Broker on Raspberry Pi - Helped me get started on installing and setting up my Raspberry Pi

• HacksterIO - Running a MQTT Broker on Raspberry Pi - Also helped me get started on installing and setting up my Raspberry Pi

• Stack Overflow - mosquito server refuses connections - Helped me figure out how to disable a firewall for port 1883 (the default mqtt broker port)

• Stack Overflow - mosquitto client refused connection - this guide helped me figure what to add to my mosquitto.conf file when I kept getting a client refused connection error

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