Plant Care Made Simple. SoilLytic watches your plants for you
SoilLytic attaches to the back of common capacitive soil moisture probes in a compact form factor allowing for smart plant monitoring. SoilLytic uses an RGB LED to emit a soft blue, green, or red light when a plant's soil is overwatered, healthy, or dry. Plant moisture levels are also sent wirelessly to Home Assistant allowing for multiple plant tracking and automation controls.
For this project, I wanted to expand my PCB making skills. Jumping from 2 layer board design to 4 layer, making my own ESP32 development circuit, sourcing surface mount components from suppliers, and practicing compact board designs.
After repeatedly forgetting to water my plants, I wanted to make a device that makes it easier for me keep track of watering schedules. But, I wanted something compact, discrete, yet feature rich.
SoilLytic attaches to the back of common capacitive soil moisture probes with the version number 1.2 or 2.0 giving it an ultra thin form factor. A common manufacturing defect in these soil moisture probes has an unconnected trace that is supposed to link the analog signal to ground through a 1M ohm resistor. By soldering a 1M ohm resistor at the connection point, ADC readings will normalize much quicker which is critical for proper calibration.
SoilLytic PCB V1.0 offers 2.4GHz and Bluetooth 5.0 connection options, Sensirion ambient air temperature and humidity readings, RGB LED for visual alerts, guided soil calibration procedure, crystal oscillator circuit for low power applications, USB-C for power and programming, over amp protection, ESD protection, and power smoothing.
SoilLytic makes calibration simple with a guided procedure. Insert the probe into a dry reference soil, press the calibration button, then the LED will flash purple three times and turn solid red for 12s while it takes dry readings. Once the LED flashes purple again, remove the probe, and insert it into the wet soil reference. The LED will turn solid blue for 12s while it takes wet readings. When the LED flashes purple, the calibration procedure is now complete.
For more information about SoilLytic, please download the PDF below.
