Hi! I’m super excited about building my smart irrigation system using your tools. I’m mostly familiar with using soil potential data for assessing water availability and I wonder if your setup can work with something like the Watermark sensor (https://www.irrometer.com/200ss.html).

My experience with collecting environmental data has always been on the Campbell Scientific platform and in large agricultural settings using sensors like this: https://www.campbellsci.com/253-l or

https://www.metergroup.com/environment/products/teros-21/

I really think your set of tools and code could make that a lot easier to handle if you want to add the ability to work with watermark sensors. The digital sensor from Metergroup provides output in SDI-12 format and I think there are several ways to read the digital data but the digital sensors are quite expensive at almost $200 each. The Watermark ones can be found on eBay for $50. $50 sure sounds more economical!

Anyway, I’m super interested in building something that uses this type of sensor or a coupled set of these sensors with volumetric water content sensors to tell me when to irrigate but I don’t think the capacity is built in to your platform right now. Do you have an interest in trying to make that work? Preferably with the cheaper Watermark sensor?

One of the reasons why having potential data is useful is in building water retention curves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_retention_curve) so we know how much water the plants can access via capillary forces compared to how much is physically in the soil matrix as a volumetric potential. Most of the sensors out there just give volumetric water content, not potential.

Thank you!