E.W.C Blog 6 - Additions

Hello everyone!

In this blog I will present what I did more for this challenge. If in the previous blog I added some cables to two plugs, now it's time to fix the LattePanda board in the enclosure.

First of all, I need a motherboard on which to mount PattePanda because I have not found another solution. There are enough attachment points inside the case, I have no way to attach the PattePanda with screws to make it a more solid attachment because the mounting holes do not match, and I have no intention of using hot glue to stick it.

I found a plastic plate, it is quite soft, easy to process. I cut it to fit and made holes to attach the PattePanda. I used metal spacers, unfortunately I didn't have any plastic ones (insulators), but to make sure I won't have problems I used some plastic insulating washers. In the end, I tried to ensure LattePanda as best as I can. The distance is 5-6mm.

I know there is still a lot of space left inside the enclosure, but that's how I thought of placing the parts. I will connect the power source to the LattePanda board through the micro-USB connector and I will connect the two sensors through jump wires. I don't intend to use batteries for power supply because I don't have anything that powerful, with a large capacity. Obviously, I will also use the antenna mounted on the enclosure.

I also did a test with a soil moisture sensor. I connected the sensor to an Arduino board (on the LattePanda I will have an Arduino Leonardo), I also added a DHT22 sensor and an LCD display for displaying the data.
I left the plant without water for a while so I could figure out what values the sensor registers in drier soil. As expected, for a dry soil I obtained values lower than 300, somewhere around 160-170. Then I started to pour water into the vase and the values increased, over 700. The initially detected values are not very suggestive, because the sensor felt the presence of the abundance of water, but after two minutes the values stabilized, between 300 and 700 should to have moist soil.

I also have a video with a test: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14bwkMxcjHppFsRmTOmZ8N_lrqYHJ1wWs/view?usp=sharing 

The next blog will be my last.

Thank you. Have a nice day!