Raspberry Pi soil moisture sensor

Welcome back Guys 👋. I hope you are finding my posts on Raspberry PI interesting. Let’s continue with today’s topic: Raspberry Pi Soil-Moisture sensor. Like other sensors based on LM393 it is also same but working and reading are a bit different. To know more about it and to see how it is hooked to Pi. Let’s Begin !!!!!

Soil-Moisture Sensor:

Soil-Moisture sensor is a LM393 based sensor which is an Op-Amp IC. For more information on Op-Amps Google it. For now in simple words it amplifies the current value received by the probes dug into the soil for testing moisture content in soil. I strongly recommend you to first look at it’s arduino tutorial for better and easy understanding. As coding for arduino is much simpler as in Python. If you want its Schematic diagram then click here.

It’s value can be adjusted by using the Potentiometer provided on it. It has both type of output Analog and Digital. To know the difference between Google it. In short words Digital value is either 0 or 1. Whereas analog value ranges from 0 to 1024.

Material Required:

• Raspberry Pi with screen, keyboard and mouse (Raspberry Pi 4 | 4GB variant used in tutorial)
• Soil-moisture sensor
• Red and Green Led

Circuit Diagram:

Raspberry PI	Soil Moisture Sensor
GPIO 14	D0 Pin
+5 Volt	VCC
GND	GND
RPI	LED 1	LED 2	220 ohm Rsistor1	220 ohm Resistor 2
GPIO 12	Anode Terminal
GPIO 16		Anode Terminal
GND			Terminal 1	Terminal 1
	Cathode Terminal		Terminal 2
		Cathode Terminal		Terminal 2

NOTE: The pins connection areas:

• soil moisture sensor —> GPIO14 | PIN 8
• RGB Red —> GPIO12 | PIN 32
• RGB Green —> GPIO 16 | PIN 36
• Rest are Power connection VCC —> PIN 2 & 4, GND —> PIN 6

Programming Pi :

First, we import RPi.GPIO module. Then we set the mode to BOARD numbering.

After that, we define 3 pins 1 as input and rest as output with the initial state of Pins as low.

gp.setup(8,gp.IN)    
 gp.setup(36,gp.OUT,initial=gp.LOW)  
 gp.setup(32,gp.OUT,initial=gp.LOW)  

Then in the While loop, we put the try and error concept to terminate the program by using the Ctrl+C command and gives the condition for output.

As in my previous article on IR Sensor, I have clearly defined the reverse output we are getting due to the non-inverting Op-Amp circuit using LM393. So, we have to reverse the output and input by using ‘not’ as a prefix.

print(not gp.input(8))  
 gp.output(36,gp.input(8))  
 gp.output(32,not gp.input(8))    

Here is the complete code:

import RPi.GPIO as gp  
 gp.setmode(gp.BOARD)  
 gp.setup(8,gp.IN)   
 gp.setup(36,gp.OUT,initial=gp.LOW)  
 gp.setup(32,gp.OUT,initial=gp.LOW)  
 while True:  
   try:  
     print(not gp.input(8))  
     gp.output(36,gp.input(8))  
     gp.output(32,not gp.input(8))   
   except :  
     gp.cleanup()  

The working video of this is attached below. Have a look at it and see it’s working for better understanding.

With this, we end our today’s tutorial of Raspberry Pi soil moisture sensors. I hope you like it. For any queries, ask me below.

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