A Wireless smart agriculture kit is a great purchase to control, monitor, and deploy a smart agriculture solution with ease. Kits usually come with everything needed to get started and reduce the need to look all over for dozen of parts and components needed to build the perfect wireless irrigation system.
In this article, we will cover the topic of wireless smart agriculture kits: how to control your plans using such kits, wireless vs wired solutions, and the difference between indoor and outdoor smart agriculture kits.
Indoor and Outdoor wireless smart agriculture kit
Kits come in different shapes and forms and no single kit is designed to be the same. Different kits apply for different applications. Whenever you are going to use your wireless smart agriculture kit for indoor or outdoor use will define what type of kit is most suitable for your needs.
Indoor wireless smart agriculture kit
Indoor Wireless smart agriculture built by @traverseda using Eduponics Mini
For indoor use, we might want to consider the following options:
- Ability to plug the kit into a power wall (AC/DC).
- Durability and long-term usage.
- Agriculture dev board that supports WiFi / Bluetooth for connectivity purposes.
Whenever you have single or multiple plants indoors, those specifications are crucial to make your solution work.
Outdoor wireless smart agriculture kit
For outdoors, things are a little different. We might want to consider the following options for an outdoor solution:
- Waterproof case.
- RTC (real-time clock) to keep track of the time.
- Batteries and UPS solution
- Solar charging
- Long-distance wireless solutions such as LoRa/LoRaWAN and others.
For outdoor solutions, reliability is important so you might want to consider a product that has been tested for quite a while.
Wired vs wireless smart agriculture kit
If you are considering whether to use a wired or wireless solution, the answer is – it depends.
For outdoor use, most likely you’d like to purchase an outdoor wireless smart agriculture kit. If you want to build an indoor farm, however, a wired kit would work perfectly fine.
Wired kits are very likely to work outdoors as well but might need some extra components and extension boards. Wireless smart agriculture kit, however, might lack WiFi/Bluetooth communication protocols which are common for consumer and house use.
Before purchasing your smart agriculture kit, ensure it supports the right protocols and is suitable for your project needs.
IoT sensors for smart agriculture
When it comes to agriculture IoT kits, an IoT development board is just not enough. In order to make the entire solution work right out of the box, we need to ensure it contains The right sensors and modules to enable us to monitor the environment properly.
IoT soil moisture sensors
Eduponics IoT soil moisture sensors
The most common sensor in agriculture IoT kits is the soil moisture sensor. This sensor enables us to monitor the amount of water in the soil, knowing this, we can decide when and if to water our plants and garden.
There are different types of soil moisture sensors such as resistive soil moisture sensors and capacitive soil moisture sensors. Capacitive, also called “corrosion resistant sensor” has a long operation life due to it being resistant to corrosion.
If you are looking for a precise soil moisture sensor, the Eduponics capacitive soil moisture sensor might be just for you. If you want to learn more about the best IoT soil moisture sensors check the previous IoT soil moisture sensors for smart irrigation systems.
IoT environment monitoring sensors
The soil moisture sensor is not enough to make a complete IoT smart irrigation system. We might want to consider one or more of the abilities below:
- Monitor the environment temperature
- Monitor the environment’s humidity
- Monitor barometric pressure (air pressure)
- Monitor water quantity
- Reading light intensity
If you are wondering how to get all those delightful features, you should worry no more, we got you covered! with Eduponics mini ESP32 IoT development board you can have all those features and more. Eduponics mini comes with BME280 precise temperature humidity and barometric pressure sensor, water quantity sensor, photodiode light sensor, and a variety of IO to expand its functionality.
Summary
When you are about to purchase the next wireless smart agriculture kit you should consider where and how you are going to use it, an indoor kit might be suitable for outdoor use but an outdoor kit is not always workable indoors.
Eduponics mini IoT development board is designed to work both indoors and outdoors, with a printable 3D enclosure you can protect it under a variety of conditions. The Eduponics smart agriculture IoT kit contains everything you need for indoor and outdoor applications. Eduponics, Powered by the ESP32 microcontroller, has both Bluetooth and WiFi wireless communication to enable wireless control and monitoring from anywhere.
The kit comes with a one-of-a-kind hackable app to monitor and water plants remotely with a single touch.
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