Tindie

This moisture sensors come with uncomplete firmware, sending to mqtt doesn't work. Seller promise to fix it in future releases which never comes and finaly he didn't respond at all. Very unprofessional communication, the device from HW side is OK, but without suitable SW it is useless.

Gustavo | Dec. 28, 2023

Sensors are not sent.

I have requested 16 sensors on December 20 and I still do not have answers of their shipment. I have written to the mail and nothing. I would like to know the problem for which it has not yet been sent.

Response from Catnip electronics | Dec. 29, 2023

Sorry for the delay - holiday season is to blame here. I will ship sensors via DHL to compensate for delay.

Arsenijs | July 21, 2023

Very satisfied with my purchase

For Low power LoRa I2C & RS485 node

Was shipped and arrived quickly, and was just what my friend wanted to get as a gift. Thank you so much!

Giovanni | Jan. 9, 2023

Not delivered

The first shipping returns purchased products to the sender.
The second too.

The previous order has been delivered to the same shipping address.

GN

Chris | April 4, 2022

Slow response makes it less useful

When Chirp detects that the soil is dry, it start chirping (it sounds more like a clicking than a cricket chirping to me). But then when you water the plant, it doesn’t stop. So you keep watering, trying to shut it up, and overwater the plant. It might help if we could water near it, but the manual says not to. I imagine it takes some time for moisture to spread through the soil to the chirp. Maybe we need a way to mute it for an hour? Pressing the button resets the set point, so that’s difficult. The led is useful in working out which plant needs watering, that wasn’t documented.

Vladimir | Oct. 11, 2021

Everything works

One year or so with (non-rugged) sensors. They just work. Nothing was broken or broke over that time.

The coating of non-rugged sensors does indeed flake off (in my case it was ~6 months, YMMV), just as description says.

i2c is not an ideal protocol for long-ish wires. Errors do occur, but they are easy to handle in software (sanity checks, median filter and reboot after too many failures gave me months and months of continuous samples from multiple sensors) and hey, i2c version is cheaper! ^^

Couple of suggestions:
- please add a note that sensor address is saved so "smart" people like me won't start making a complex one-by-one startup and address change for a bunch of sensors connected to one SoC :D
- how about configurable attenuation (if the hardware allows)? All the samples I get are well within [300, 600] range, which is a bit of a waste of 16bit precision.

TL/DR: great sensor, nice price, fast shipping

Response from Catnip electronics | Oct. 11, 2021

Hi Vladimir, thanks for the review! I will address your suggestions in the documentation asap. Frankly I don't see a point in artificially mapping the result into a single byte - a lot of people with scientific background love the sensor because it gives the most raw unprocessed data - I don't want to lose that.

Christian | April 16, 2021

are worth the money!

I have been using 3 of them (I2C, RUGGED version) since May 2020. The sensors are located outdoors under a roof (loggia). The RasPi reads the soil moisture every 3 hours via I2C. I am very satisfied with the sensors and can only recommend them to everyone.

Johannes | April 5, 2021

Amazing!

Hello! The Sensors are awesome, and the Developer is very Kind and Helpful! I use 5 of the rs485 sensors with a Arduino-Mega, and have attached a LCD where the values are shown directly when measuring, and I have add a sleep time, where in this sleep time period two graphs are shown, with Temperature and Moisture on this LCD! I can very recommend this product! Thanks!

Response from Catnip electronics | April 5, 2021

Thank you for a great review, Johannes!

Roletta | March 2, 2021

What a lovely item!

We received the Chirps and are very pleased with these helpfull waterreminders. A nice modest chirp sounds when at first the plant is thirsty, no annoying sound, just a little chirp. If you ignore it, it sounds a littler louder and the interval decreases so it urges you to want to water your plant.

Love it!

For us, not so technical people, a little user manual with pictures would be nice. But nevertheless we managed to figure it out :-)

Roman | Jan. 15, 2021

Very good value for money sensor

After trying a number of other moisture sensors with little success, I ordered this one as it appeared to be well thought out and designed. Works very well so far, the remaining question is its longevity. For the price, it is very good value. I will be purchasing more of these.

Response from Catnip electronics | Jan. 16, 2021

Thanks!

Bernhard | Jan. 7, 2021

Sales and shipping ok product cannot convince.

The sensor is connected to an esp8266.
After a while, the data from the sensor cannot be read.
Then only power off/on the sensor help.

Response from Catnip electronics | Jan. 7, 2021

Hello Bernhard,

ESP8266 is tricky sometimes doe to bugs in its I2C protocol implementation - lowering cable length and I2C clock speed helps. Contact me if you have more problems.

Franco | Nov. 19, 2020

Very good till now

I have received the sensor for about a month. The first few days I had to do some wisely to find out how to place it and how much to wet the plant, now it is working regularly, it seems to me to be regularly warning me when it's time to water with a nice cricket cry.

Edward | Aug. 2, 2020

Great sensors, easy to use with ESP8266

I've been using these sensors for a while, starting with a Chirp that I eventually ended up using purely as an I2C sensor with an ESP8266. I recently purchased some of the sensor-only models and am impressed by their quality - easy to use with an Arduino library, with sensor readings that are stable even when reading extremely rarely. Thank you for making these!

Pierre | July 24, 2020

Nickel

Semble parfaitement fonctionnel en mode "Arduino"... à voir maintenant avec des ESP.
Envoi relativement rapide Lituanie --> France ~1semaine
Bravo

Jerome | July 20, 2020

Good product

Works well. I put it on a thin latex glove to limit the corrosion. Values are still coherent. I use it with an ESP32 for auto watering. Very satisfied by the result !

Josef | June 20, 2020

Great products, easy setup, got it up and running fast!

UPDATE:
Have the sensor network with 6 sensors up and running outdoors 24/7 since 2+ month with a Pi ZERO via an USB dongle (extra power supply to sensors, 20m daisychain), providing data to a MQTT server.
Readings are reproducible on individual sensor level, robust and accurate enough for irrigation.
Will order some more sensors...
UPDATE END!

My setup is one USB dongle with 6 rugged sensors in one daisy chain, connected with the T-interconnects. Soft- and hardware setup (followed the tutorial, made some changes in the python scripts to post the readings to a MQTT server) was swift and straight forward!
Calibration not done yet, will be next! The sensors show very narrow readings, so calibration shouldn´t be a big thing.
...
Scanning bus on port COM5 at baud rate 19200
Found 6 sensors: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
mosquitto_pub.exe -h xxx... -t office/garden/1 -m {"temperature":"25.8","moisture":" 274"}
mosquitto_pub.exe -h xxx... -t office/garden/2 -m {"temperature":"26.2","moisture":" 276"}
mosquitto_pub.exe -h xxx... -t office/garden/3 -m {"temperature":"25.8","moisture":" 274"}
mosquitto_pub.exe -h xxx... -t office/garden/4 -m {"temperature":"25.8","moisture":" 275"}
mosquitto_pub.exe -h xxx... -t office/garden/5 -m {"temperature":"26.0","moisture":" 271"}
mosquitto_pub.exe -h xxx... -t office/garden/6 -m {"temperature":"25.8","moisture":" 272"}
...

Jose | June 16, 2020

NO LO HE RECIBIDO

TODAVIA NO HE RECIBIDO ESTO RUEGO ME COMENTEN AL RESPECTO , LES RUEGO POR FAVOR SE PONGAN EN CONTACTO PARA DAR SOLUCION AL TEMA ME HACE FALTA

Ernestas | June 9, 2020

It is more than just a water sensor

Feels like plants started to talk to me with a delicate chirp.
Nice and well thought out device.
And plants are happier.

Rik | June 2, 2020

It really works!

I intentionally waited quite a while before posting a review, because often it is pretty easy to build something that functions one week, a month.. and then it dies.... The good news is, in this case this is not er... the case (sorry I'm not a native speaker)
This little thing does what it needs to do without any hassle, it does so predictably and it's golden it shuts off when it gets dark (really really nice addition.)
One small niggle maybe is it misses a little scap of paper in the package that shows the orientation of the battery. I can imagine inserting it the right way is puzzling for some people.
Other than that: PERFECT!

Sergey | Feb. 25, 2020

Thanks, everything is fine.

Good sensor, working from the box even under esp . Seems reliable. There is only one little drawback - no any calibration values or formulas.
What i have figured out that dependency capacity-voltage almost linear it might be calculated through linear regression. For instance - for absolutely dried soil the capacity is going to be about 340 by 2,4V and 229 by 4.1V.

Response from Catnip electronics | Feb. 26, 2020

Thank you for your review! Can you share your findings with the community? I would add it to the documentation.

Bernd | Dec. 10, 2019

Good sensor, nicely done and supported

Wow, delivery took endless, but its not the sellers fault.

The sensor looks really nice and sturdy. Hope the rigid version can withstand the soil and water attacks when it is buried in the field.
Software support is good and I got the sensor working within an hour after I opened the package.

Jens | Oct. 28, 2019

Really solid sensor. Top of class!

This is the best capacitive moisture sensor I've tested. It's fully featured, close to linear (to the degree I can measure it) and very flexible. I love that you can change the I2C address that easily, making it possible to have 100+ of these on one single micro (in theory, not reality). Well worth the money. I did a longer writeup and comparison of this and others on my blog https://flashgamer.com/blog/comments/testing-capacitive-soil-moisture-sensors

Response from Catnip electronics | Nov. 1, 2019

Thanks for a good review and a very nice writeup! Regarding linearity - I must say this is true only with tap water. When in soil, salinity plays an important role - you can see a graph in pictures of the sensor on this page.

Slaven | July 10, 2019

Great product so far...

Hi I bought Modbus RS485 soil moisture sensor with usb dongle and tested it with python library available on raspberry pi.

It's very easy to setup on raspberry pi...

Now I'm trying to figure out how to use it with arduino uno and I'm not quite sure how to do it.

I saw Henry's review saying he is using MKR1000 and on his github (https://github.com/lincoln2016/Arduino-RS485-Moisture-Sensor) he wrote that he is using MKR 485 Shield for it (https://store.arduino.cc/arduino-mkr-485-shield).

This is the part I'm not sure about, in the example and the documentation there is no word about needing to use RS-485 shield for the arduino?

I'm more of a programmer and less electronics guy so please consider that when reading this review I'm not sure if I can use Modbus RS485 soil moisture sensor directly on my arduino uno without a shield, any help or input is much appreciated.

Can you somehow contact me...

Slaven Olujic

Response from Catnip electronics | July 10, 2019

Hi Slaven,

Thank you for your review. RS485 is a specific electric level protocol that needs a special transceiver chip to interface. So to answer your question - yes, you do need a RS485 shield or a single chip to interface the sensor from Arduino or any other platform for that matter. For example - USB-to-RS485 dongle does just that - interfaces USB to RS485.

Tim | June 4, 2019

Not a bad item, but bad comms from the maker.

Soil sensor appears to have a problem when put to sleep. Resolved by removing power to the sensor when the controlling micro is asleep and then powering the soil sensor fresh every time. I asked the maker for advice but no contact after 10 days.

Aside from that, the sensor is well made and outputs a stable moisture reading.

Response from Catnip electronics | June 6, 2019

Hi there,

I have written two emails to you, but got no response, probably our mailing systems are not playing nice. Can you please file a bug report on github page? https://github.com/Miceuz/i2c-moisture-sensor/issues

Ors | May 23, 2019

Great product, working as expected.

I used the I2C version of this sensor on a large project and are pretty happy with the performance. This RS485 version is a great upgrade to the communications part of the sensor. In my particular case, because of the limitations of wire length of the I2C protocol, I had to use fairly large number of ESP8266 devices to communicate the sensor values to the server. Using this RS485 version sensor I can have long cable runs and the overall complexity of future projects decreases dramatically. These sensors are easy to work with and the libraries work well out of the box. I recommend using these for all soil moisture monitoring needs. Great product.

Ors | May 20, 2019

Works perfectly out of the box

Very nice plant watering alarm device. Just followed the instructions and got it working right away. High quality components and stable functionality.

Alberto | April 19, 2019

Sensor lost

Hi.
I lost 2 sensors in this strange way: after about a week of fine work, all two sensors write a capacitative value of 1010-1020 in dry conditions and are fixed in this value. Normal value for dry conditions is about 250.
I used these sensors in a new board with ESP8266 -07 and ESP Easy system, with pull-up resistor of 1K because I have about 5-6 mt cables. Before this, these sensors worked fine for about 1 year on a ESP8266-01 board with 3.3k pull-up resistor.
Maybe this low resistor is the cause of what happen ?
Thanks
Alberto

Response from Catnip electronics | April 19, 2019

Hi Alberto, thank you for your review!

Was it rugged variant or non-rugged? Most probably protection varnish layer got damaged and water got to the components. Better contact me directly via Tindie PM system so we can investigate the issue.

Henry | March 11, 2019

working well

I have about 10 of the I2C rugged sensors in the field working, the issue was they had to be close to the arduino controller. I now have 2 of the rugged rs485 sensors hooked up to a MKR1000 in the lab, producing data regularly and accurately. It took a while to get the serial library to work on the MKR1000 board. I have a sketch on github i am using, it may help you read the registers and or change a sensors ID. https://github.com/lincoln2016/Arduino-RS485-Moisture-Sensor

Thomas | March 11, 2019

Excellent, would buy again!

I am using the rugged version to monitor the moisture and temperature of chili peppers from a Raspberry Pi. Shipping was very quick, so there was not much of a wait (northern Europe). The sensor was easy to connect, and the readings just work out-of-the-box using the chirp script (https://github.com/ageir/chirp-rpi). I have been collecting one data point per minute over the past week to draw graphs and curves and so far it has been great.

Calibration of the moisture sensor is delicate, and while that has nothing to do with the sensor itself, I found that it is best to keep the raw values instead of trying to rely on percentages. I also learned that it is critical to not touch or move the moisture sensor once it has found its place, lest that can skew the measurements. The temperature sensor (which seems to be located above the ground) is also much more useful than I expected: i learned that plants do get burned when exposed to the sun behind a window. In hindsight, I would have chosen the non-rugged version to have the light sensor too as I am using the sensor only indoors.

Milan | March 5, 2019

Great product

I have been using sensor v 2.7.1 for more than a year. Accurate, without any issues. I was using only wire library.
I hope that v 2.7.8 is as good as v 2.7.1 ( did not checked yet).

Vladimir | Feb. 25, 2019

Great and affordable

This is a great soil moisture sensor, we installed them on a farm, 9 months, 60 centimetres underground, and they worked flawlessly.
They accuracy is decent, but they are affected by salts and dissolved solids. What I mean by that is, if you put it into moist sponge, you will get much higher reading if the water was salty to begin with

Joachim | Feb. 12, 2019

Works well, would be nice if more "generic"

I bought 3 of the I2C Soil moisture sensors, and have one hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 0 monitoring a plant. It works as expected. However, it is a pain to solder wires to it, so proper through-hole pads would be nice, then one could also attach e.g. a 4 pin header. The other suggestion would be to make the I2C version of the soil moisture sensor simply the same PCB as the Chirp with the beeper and battery holder not fitted. That way the end-user can always convert it later if desired.

Alexandr | Feb. 10, 2019

Perfect product!

I have been following the development of this project for a long time, built two sensors, one with the Particle Photon and the second with ESP8266, 4.7k Ohm pull-up resistors are needed.
Thanks.

Dominik | Nov. 24, 2018

Great product, fast delivery