Haven't had the chance to try it out in soil yet, but reading the comments it looks promising. It uses capacitance instead of resistance and connects directly to the I2C pins of the Pi. So, easier to setup and should be more reliable.
Not really made for gardening projects but its monitoring and alerting capabilities are pretty much perfect for this kind of application. Not to mention how easy it was to set it up on the Pi and get all (temperature, moisture, light) the sensor data in.
...nope. This'll give you a nice little touch sensor but not much more than that. Try turning this into any sort of usable measurement of soil moisture as opposed to "there's wet soil on this strip of foil" and you'll run into a wall.
Miceuz's work is excellent and this sensor in particular is on point. I've been using a handful of them with an ESP8266 as a wireless I2C master for the last year or so.
Beware of the delivery time though. It took them 3 weeks to ship the sensor from Lithuania to Estonia :)
For pump and other peripheral control I plan on using an opto-isolated relay board. You can get one for really cheap and they're easy to setup with the Pi. Check this wiki on how to use the board in isolation mode.
https://www.tindie.com/products/miceuz/i2c-soil-moisture-sen...
Haven't had the chance to try it out in soil yet, but reading the comments it looks promising. It uses capacitance instead of resistance and connects directly to the I2C pins of the Pi. So, easier to setup and should be more reliable.
On the software side I use Grafana https://grafana.com/
Not really made for gardening projects but its monitoring and alerting capabilities are pretty much perfect for this kind of application. Not to mention how easy it was to set it up on the Pi and get all (temperature, moisture, light) the sensor data in.