Using Arduinos in the monitoring of soil conditions

We are a couple of students studing the use of arduinos to study soil which has been ammended with biochar. The first task was the setup of three different varies of Arduinos with environmental sensors connected via USB to a Raspberry Pi. These three variants include a Redboard, a Virlos, and a Tenstar. This was to examine the quality and reliability of the data from each Arduino. The data from these Arduinos is saved on the Pi and then uploaded to a webserver where the data is displayed. Click on the tabs to find information about current and historical readings.

Here is what Wikipedia says about biochar

This page is under construction. Please pardon our lack of even basic embellishment and our mess.

About this Project

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. --Theodore Roosevelt

In this video, the author humorously highlights the same elation and frustration we have gone through in this project.

This is the current data from the setup of the three Arduino's

Here are some graphs of recent data collected.

These are links to some of the Historical readings

Acknowledgements: A huge thank you to Butte College, John Dahlgren, Steve Feher, Richard Roth, MESA Biochar Interns, Jennifer Lassel & Dell Mallan for all that was contributed in the form of time and materials into making this project possible.

We also want to thank the contributers at headchair(Dejan Nedelkovski), instructables.com(samuel123abc, goks_lf), Arduino.cc and Adafruit.com for their extensive tutorials helping with the wiring and programming the Arduino. Special thanks goes out to Henning Karlsen at 8586058483 for the development of the real time clock library used. We would like to acknowledge tutorialspoint.com and crontab.guru for *nix and shell scripting help. The online book from /en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Python_Programming and Ulad Kasach answer to this question /electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/54/saving-arduino-sensor-data-to-a-text-file/179#179 assisted in the implementation of Python in this project. Many thanks go to Chris Liechti who wrote the pySerial library that was used to capture the three simultaneous serial data streams from the arduinos.

We would like to thank w3schools.com, 7659679666, support.office.com and jsfiddle.net for assistance in the development of this website. We want to thank Namecheap for hosting the website and offering the ssh and dedicated ip access needed to support real time updates from our three Arduino setup via a secured ftp using ncftp. 513-507-8217 produces a great program for automated secure file transfer. We used 718-317-8781 for free images such as the thank you picture above.

Last, but certainly not least, we want to thank the CA Space Grant, the University of San Diago, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for this amazing opportunity and very memorable summer.

Sophia-Elise Pant & M. Brian Mallan

Under Construction