Tindie

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.

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.

Pierre | July 24, 2020

Nickel

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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

Dominik | Nov. 24, 2018

Great product, fast delivery

Hi,

thk for the fast delivery (this was really totally unexpected).

I didn't tested all of the sensors yet, but atleast i can confirm that the USB dongle works fine on macos. The hard part was to find out the chipset it uses, so i think this is something you can mention in the wiki page. I used this driver for osx: https://sparks.gogo.co.nz/ch340.html

After restart the dongle was available as "/dev/tty.wchusbserial1410"

If i'm right you are shipping this dongle: http://www.sah.co.rs/lx08h.html They mention also a windows driver there, maybe it makes sense to also cross-link them here as well.

The python module works as well. Next step is probably to see how they work within a Modbus TCP environment (using a software to convert it to modbus TCP). Once i have my setup running and put the sensors in the garden i will try to review again ;-)

Pavol | Nov. 2, 2018

Well done

After several cheap-versions from Aliexpress, the original works fine.
Watch out the pull-up resistors on both I2C lines, Chirp does not work without them.

Markus | Aug. 3, 2018

Great Product!

Had ordered 2 exemplars v2.7.6... for a prototype installation... and they work like a charm (driven by Espruino JS mc - Espruino.com - IoT w/ JavaScript - http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/270246/).

Lithuanian Postal Service - AB Lietuvos paštas - https://www.post.lt/en/contacts/contact-us - could have been a bit more helpful regarding tracking of the shipment after it reached the postal service / entry office of the destination country, and tell me that I could used the same tracking number to figure out about expected arrival - may be it is just me not knowing that... :O - rather than just tell me to contact my local postal service office :(. The package seemed 'sitting' for 8 days at the destination country entry office according to the Lithuanian Postal Service tracking when I contacted Lithuanian Postal Service, but it was actually moving and arrived at my house on the 11th day after getting into the hands of destination country postal service. Total shipping time was 16 days: 5 days in in to get to the destination country postal service on a different continent, and 11 (ELEVEN) days to get to my place! Usually it would take 3 max 4 days... All in all: no (real) complaint!

Christian | June 17, 2018

Nice product !

Really easy to use with the right library for arduino.
Compatible library with ESP8266 (NODEMCU for example).
Humidity is quite accurate, and stable. If request sensor every minute for example, no problem.
Usefull for IoT for example (connected plant), automatic irrigation, and so much.
I use only humidity value, because i bought rugged model, light level is always at 65535...
Temperature is quite high vs normal, i don't know what sensor is used, but not very accurate.

Good product in general...better price/quality ratio vs others on market.
I hardly recommand !

J | June 5, 2018

Nice toy to 'annoy' others in there homes.... :)

This is a way cool toy to 'annoy' friends. I bought a couple and have placed one in a plant at my friends place. She hates small animals like crickets. So that was fun when something is chirping in there house :P. But also, as she does not know yet, the plant needs water.

But I have another non issue. I have real crickets in my house, and now I am thinking that all my plants are dry :P. The sound of the Chirp is that good compared to the real animals. So I have to listen good from where the sounds get to make sure it is the plant. :D

Further, the hardware looks very good and solid. I have used other and, yes cheaper devices, but they are way worse compared to this. So spent a bit more money, but you will get better stuff and more fun!

Daniel | May 31, 2018

Best soil moisture sensor

I got this RS485 sensor as a replacement for the I2C sensor, where I had issues. During our communication, the seller was very helpfull and obliging. After following the instructions, this RS485 sensor works out of the box. According to the provided Python library, it's also easy to use it on other software stacks. In my case, I want to use Typescript/Node.js on a Raspberry Pi 3. Using the avaliable open source documentations, you can search suiteable librarys for serial communication and get the data like moisture or temperature by writing a short wrapper. In my case, I'm using modbus-serial npm package. My wrapper class with all operations (moisture, temp, get/change id) has about ~80 lines of code.

The sensor itself works great for several weeks now. My software has a cron, which read the moisture every 5 minutes. It's very stable, upon now I never had any issues. My choice fell to the rugged version, so that no short circuits happen when the sensor gets some water during watering. I found no better sensor for those purpose. Only ones that are more expensive, analog (so you need an additionally AD converter) and morever proprietary (which in general I don't like).

In summary, I'm completely statisfied with this product. In the meantime, my first ordered sensor for testing purpose was extended by several new ones in a second order to monitor more plants :)

Response from Catnip electronics | May 16, 2019

Hi Daniel,
Did you by chance release the Javascript code as a library for the sensor?

David | April 26, 2018

Review after 1 Year

Bought 2 of the rugged Sensors a year ago.
The I2C Communication protocoll is very simple and the possibility to change the devices adress over I2C is very useful. But there is the first problem. I had it several times that the I2C adress changed randomly when i tried to implement other sensors on the same bus. This command should be better protected.
The rugged version is good but not 100% water resistant. The water comes inside along the cable and the glue of the shrinktube is not waterresistant. This happened to one Sensor after i put the whole sensor in the soil. Maybee its better to seal the whole sensor with epoxy.

Some other points:
- black sensor exposed to direct sunlight gives temperature results above 50°C. Surround it with white tape helps a bit. The best solution is to put the whole sensor 1-2 cm under the soil surface.
- sensor works below 0°C but the minimum value is 0°C

Response from Catnip electronics | April 27, 2018

Hello,

Thank you for this through review!

Address change bug is worked on right now. All the sensors with firmware version 2.6 will have a fix for this. These will be hw v2.7.6 rugged sensors available in upcoming weeks.

I would like to seal the cable connection with epoxy also, but it's a major pain to handle cables while coating the sensors - sensors have to be cured in high temperature, etc. That's why we have decided to rely on hot glue lining of heatshrink. Hot glue is surprisingly robust as a sealant. Yours is the first report of failure, I would like to investigate it closer. Can you contact me directly about this?

0°C was a bug in the library - I have doublechecked it this winter - it returns and displays values below 0 no problem. Maybe the fault you experienced is somehow related to the failure due to water entering the heatshrink?

Thanks again for review!

Simon | April 12, 2018

Works as expected and very good service from the seller.

I bought two of those for a home project that I wanted to do early last summer. Unfortunately, there was some issue in the mailing and the sensors never showed up. Contacted the seller and he/she was quick on sending another set of two. The sensors finally showed up less than two weeks after.

I tried to connect those the cheap way by using some ebay C25b mini boards. I was never able to fine tune the modbus and kept having issues with some sort of debounce. I played as much as I could to get the serial port and modbus in sync but never got quite there. I finally decided to stop wasting my time and bought a 30$ FTDI usb to RS485. Done. Worked immediately.

My advice: save yourself some time and make sure you get a decent RS485 dongle and it will work like a charm.

Guttorm | March 26, 2018

*****

I bought a piece of the RS485 Soil Moisture Sensor (rugged version) a month ago. I have tested the sensor, it work very well and I am able to use it on my already existing RS485 bus between microcontrollers and a computer. The shipment was quick, the source code (following website links) was understandable, the only thing I missed was some wireing diagram, so here is the correct wireing: black = GND red = +5V yellow = noninverting RS485 green = inverting RS485.
The cable assembled on the rugged version could be longer, 1 meter is a bit short, I would like it to be 2 meter for further production....

This serial communication sensor is the only affortable one I have found after searching the internet, so today I have ordered 10 more for use in an automatic irrigating system inside a greenhouse. Next year I am planning to expand with 10 more...

Great product, good value for the money!
Thanks to the producer from me in the arctic part of Norway.

Olivier | Feb. 28, 2018

Close to professional performance for a DIY product

We use both versions of the sensor as part of a demonstrator with our design platform 6TRON (http://6tron.io/homepage/) for a test set-up.
The rugged version is in operation for over 3 monthes and performs well.
We have packaged the non rugged version with different tropicalized varnishes.
These are under test.
The capacitive technology is well adapted for soil moisture sensors, and the choice of frequency permits good measurements for a low cost sensor.
There is a small error compared to a very expensive reference sensor, but it is acceptable.
I recommend the product.

Charles | Nov. 10, 2017

great product. works as intended. great code examples

Bought this moisture sensor for a smart farm project. I am growing lemon seeds and also paprika. I am using these sensors to monitor my plants and watch them grow. I had to solder on pins to the ends of the rugged edition leads, which was not much trouble. the code samples on github worked great, and was able to get this data flowing into my server very quickly. the sensors are nice and big and look durable. Very satisfied!
only negative is that the shipping was very expensive

Eirik | Oct. 14, 2017

Does not work as advertised

UPDATED: Catnip Electronics were quick to respond and send me a new unit. Very happy with their service. Having used my new Chirp for a couple of weeks, I am happy to report that it works perfectly. Accordingly, I have changed my product rating to 5 stars.

I've tried to use the Chirp as described here - https://wemakethings.net/chirp/ - without any luck. The CR2032 fits very tightly on the Chirp, the fit is so tight actually that the battery is damaged (a small dent on the - side). After insertion of the battery the Chirp keeps on chirping instead of making two sounds as described in the the manual, and setting a new dry point does with the push button gives the same negative result. Have tested the Chirp on several plants, and it is quite clear that it does not work for me.

Response from Catnip electronics | Oct. 16, 2017

Hi,

Your unit might be faulty. Happens sometimes. Please PM me your order number, I will ship you a replacement!

Mike | Sept. 22, 2017

A much better moisture sensor, well made.

Much better and (hopefully) longer lasting than the cheaper resistance type. Bought 4 of these for use in poly tunnel watering system using Raspberry Pi. Good build quality, I sealed all the top and the cable connection in epoxy resin. If you're planning to use more than 1 sensor, ask to have the address set before shipping. Setting it yourself is not simple. But still a good product.

Response from Catnip electronics | June 4, 2018

Address change bug was fixed at this point, there are no issues setting address to the sensor - you have to hook up sensors one by one and assign them individual addresses.

Charles | Aug. 6, 2017

Great capacitive sensor from a great seller

I purchased the i2c version of this sensor for an outdoor plant watering project. It took me a while to get around to working on this but I have been very happy with the performance of this sensor. There are cheap resistive sensors out there but they will corrode over time and taking analog readings has limitations with noise and distance. These sensors can be sprayed with a conformal coating and completely isolated from the moisture of the soil. I had no issue with drivers, wiring, or sensitivity after coating.

If you are interested, I have fully documented my project and provided all hardware and software specs here: https://www.hackster.io/chipmc/smart-and-safe-outdoor-plant-watering-system-17d5c8

Thanks,

Chip

Response from Catnip electronics | Aug. 8, 2017

Thanks a lot for the writeup! Good luck with your project!

Petit | June 17, 2017

Good job

I'm very happy to use this sensor, is a amazing, VS dfrobot soil moisture sensor. Thank's a lot miceuz ;)

Response from Catnip electronics | June 17, 2017

Thanks!

DFrobot have a capacitive soil moisture sensor that uses the same exact technique as mine sensor, just they brought it even more to the cheap side:
* they use 555 timer to produce the square wave at ~1MHz when mine runs on 16MHz from crystal/MCU - still low to account for different soil texture but still better than running it at 1 MHz, also more stable with temperature
* they use one diode to measure the peaks of the filtered waveform while mine uses two diodes measuring both peaks and dips to get almost double the range
* they use 1n4148 diode which is cheap, I use Schottky diodes with lower voltage drop and more controlled capacitance to get even more range and more repeatability across different sensors

All in all their sensor is at least twice cheaper than mine :)

Norman | April 29, 2017

Very good looking sensor - but need some help

Hello,

I bought 3 of the sensors in the rugged version and want to connect them via I2C to my home automation system FHEM. I connected the sensor to the I2C-GPIO from my Pi3. Via i2cdetect I see the sensor with the adress 0x20. I put the sensor in a glass of water and took a look with i2cdump at register 0. The problem is, that the value of register 0 is still 02 and didn't change. Also the register 5 (temperature) didn't change. Could you please help me?

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ i2cdump -y -r 0x00-0x05 1 0x20 c
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f 0123456789abcdef
00: 02 ff ff ff ff ff ?.....

In FHEM I get the following readings over all registers
0x00x
02 04 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF

Thank you and best regards

Norman

Response from Catnip electronics | April 29, 2017

Hello,

Please write the support questions via "Contact me" button on the product page, not via review. You can email me directly to mic at wemakethings.net

Regarding your question - can you try the python based raspberry pi solution posted here - https://github.com/Miceuz/i2c-moisture-sensor ? Do all of the sensors exibit the same behavior? I would suggest lowering the I2C clock speed as the first thing to try.

Varun | April 18, 2017

Sensor is reading only 65535

Hi i recently bought a chirp I2C soil moisture sensor V2.7.4 and i hooked it up to Arduino Uno Like this
Uno Chirp
5V to VCC
Gnd GND
SDA SDA(10k Pullup)
SCL SCL(10k Pullup)

My Code is this
-----------------------------------------
#include <Wire.h>

void writeI2CRegister8bit(int addr, int value) {
Wire.beginTransmission(addr);
Wire.write(value);
Wire.endTransmission();
}

unsigned int readI2CRegister16bit(int addr, int reg) {
Wire.beginTransmission(addr);
Wire.write(reg);
Wire.endTransmission();
delay(20);
Wire.requestFrom(addr, 2);
unsigned int t = Wire.read() << 8;
t = t | Wire.read();
return t;
}

void setup() {
Wire.begin();
Serial.begin(9600);
writeI2CRegister8bit(0x20, 6); //reset
}

void loop()
{
Serial.print(readI2CRegister16bit(0x20, 0)); //read capacitance register
Serial.print(", ");
Serial.print(readI2CRegister16bit(0x20, 5)); //temperature register
Serial.print(", ");
writeI2CRegister8bit(0x20, 3); //request light measurement
Serial.println(readI2CRegister16bit(0x20, 4)); //read light register
delay(1000);
}

-----------------------------------------------------
My Serial port output is this

--------------------------------
65535, 65535, 65535
65535, 65535, 65535
65535, 65535, 65535
65535, 65535, 65535
65535, 65535, 65535
65535, 65535, 65535
--------------------------------

Would you Kindly let me know what the problem might be?

Regards
Varun

Response from Catnip electronics | April 18, 2017

Hi,

How long if your cable? Also, please write directly to me - mic at wemakethings net. Please send me your order number, we will sort it out.

Rob | April 11, 2017

Very nice sensor

I bought 2 rugged moisture sensors. What I didn't know was that the light sensor cannot be used because the upper part of the sensor is covered by the black shrinking tube. I would suggest to use a transparent shrinking tube in order to avoid this. So the moisture level and temperature can be polled but illumination is a constant and acquisition takes long. The documented wire color codes did not match the actual colors. The delivered sensors came with following codes : Black = GND, Red = Vcc, Blue = SDA, Yellow = SCL

One of the sensors was connected to a Particle-Core. It worked quite well after having connected pull-up resistors on SCL and SDA. The measured values were quite stable. The sensor suddenly stopped working for no obvious reason. Testing the sensor connected to an Arduino Mega gave the same results. The other sensor is working without any problem for the last couple of days.

Despite of it issues mentioned above, I think it is a very nice sensor, much better than the cheap sensors that corrode in a relative short time.

Flavio | April 10, 2017

good

We are still testing the product, but seems to be o.k. and cannot report deeper on it.
The shipping and documentation was o.k. so far.

Gabor | Sept. 19, 2016

Good product with a strange payment difficulty

This is a good product, excellent price/value ratio.

The temperature and the light sensors are the weekest points. They are not too accurate. I could not validate the moisture values but that seems good.

There was no attached documentation but there are plenty online so there was no problem with it.

Unfortunatelly I could not pay at Tindie webshop with my foreign (still EU) credit card. I had to repeat the payment process with PayPal (I've payed with the same credit card there). But the product arrived relatively fast after that.

Rodrigo | Aug. 17, 2016

Excellent quality product and easy to buy