Soil Moisture Monitoring - First Experiments

[@firebear14]

Awesome video. Nice to see all the steps of your research, it's really inspiring

[@ModestMaker]

Appreciate that. This venue has become a nice surrogate for my lab notebook- hoping it saves others a little time.

[@hardwareful]

+1 for starting with a summary!

[@ModestMaker]

Thanks!

[@guatagel2454]

You should use a radiation shield, like the thing 1067700 in thingiverse (there are many others, you should look for one that fits your sensor). Also, the radiation shield must be placed above 170cm from the ground and 150cm away from the nearest wall (or any vertical surface). If you don't use a radiation shield you will measure the temperature of the sensor case, not the air temperature. Great video, thank you! There is a paper, "Low-cost Shielding to Minimize Radiation Errors of Temperature Sensors in the Field, Julie M. Tarara, Gwen-Alyn Hoheisel" on the subject.

[@ModestMaker]

Awesome suggestion - thank you! On it.

[@guatagel2454]

@@ModestMaker thank you for taking the time to make all this time consuming tests!!!

[@ModestMaker]

I have a Davis Weather Station with a radiation shield that is gathering dust in my workshop. I'm going to rebuild the housing for the BME280 on my instrument using parts from the Davis station and share details shortly. I'll also include data from before an after the radiation shield upgrade to see how much bias is introduced by a poorly designed shield. I have some ideas for the exposed DS1520 thermometers as well, so looks like I have my next project lined up.

[@iz11smh]

Great video 🎉 😊

[@ModestMaker]

Thank you 🤗

[@iz11smh]

@@ModestMaker 😀