What is it?

The Salt Sentry is a device primarily aimed at People that have a water softener in their house that utilizes salt for regeneration.

The Salt sentry can measure how much salt is still present in a water softener by measuring the distance to the salt blocks/pelts and send this information to a home automation system (Currently supported: Domoticz, Home assistant and OpenHAB). This makes it possible, for example, to send a message to your phone when the salt is running out, so that you no longer have to physically check this every few weeks and prevents running out of salt.

The salt sentry connects to your Wifi and comes pre-programmed with firmware that includes a configuration portal and can be used without any programming.

More details about the Salt sentry and how to configure it can be found in the manuals Here

The salt sentry requires a micro-usb power supply, for instance a phone charger. The Salt sentry comes with a 3d printed enclosure.

Requirements

The salt sentry is only usable with water softeners where the salt blocks or pellets are above the water level at the moment the salt is filled.

Please note: Should your water softener utilize loose salt crystals rather than blocks or pellets, you may observe slightly varied readings, with potential discrepancies up to 5 cm. This variation could be crucial in determining the suitability of the salt sentry for your specific water softener model.

Fully hackable

The salt sentry utilizes the Espressif ESP-WROOM-02, which incorporates the popular ESP8266EX microprocessor. If you like, you can program it yourself with your own software, for instance with the Arduino IDE. Just hook it up to your computer, and program it like any regular ESP8266 development board. There's room on the board to solder on some headers to have access to the following pins:

• 3.3v
• GND
• GPIO02
• GPIO14
• GPIO4
• GPIO13
• GPIO16

The salt sentry uses the VL53L0X Time-of-Flight (ToF) laser-ranging sensor to measure the distance from the water softener to the salt block in the water softener.