Environmental News

Herbivores?

Bob Wilson

 

what???

 

good on them, i hope it has some kind of good effect on something

i think what the president doesn't understand is that hybrid cars aren't going to solve this puzzle

 

yeah, thats another concern, there's no panacea.

all we can do is the best we can do. i trust science for the best outcome possible, if given the opportunity

 

Plastic bed liners for farmers - hmmmm.... There's a lot of natural clay in many farming areas that does the same thing. Don't know - but I'd think that might be a safer/natural way to go. We are on a man-made lake in SoCal, and the bedding is clay. Very little percolation through it. The lake not only keeps our community several degrees cooler than the rest of the city, saving AC costs, but the lake now serves the local fire departments when the summer dry brush lights up from all of the local pyros.
.

 

any leaching from polythene pam?

 

... and many other farming areas are without such clay layers.
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That Arduino angle sounds interesting, but I did only one such project, my very last thing before retirement. And it was also to measure an environmental parameter over an extended period, recording to an SD card. But just a single design means I was never a pro. And nearly eight years faded and stale, and not having migrated the development tools forward to my current machine, means I'd be restarting almost from scratch.

 

Of course you need to bury deep enough to allow tilling for many years.

Crops like strawberries, IIRC, are already grown with plastic on top of mounds to minimize evaporation and water via drip tubing.

Mike

 

An ever increasing portion of our croplands are using no-till farming, reducing fuel use and erosion:



No-till farming is on the rise. That’s actually a big deal. - The Washington Post

 

Sorry for being dense, a couple of requirements questions:

1. Anything above the surface allowed or all buried?
2. If buried, now deep?
3. Is moisture as a function of depth required?
4. Distance between sensors?
5. Dimensions of field?
6. Cultivated?
7. Sampling duration and sample rate?
8. Duration of operation before maintenance?

Bob Wilson

 

I am familiar with TDR from my first career, for tasks such as locating damage in a long electrical cables, or compensating the input impedance along an amplifier input's switching and attenuator section. But I hadn't heard of it being applied to soil moisture sensing.

The first unit to come up said "The shortest TDR manufactured in the world is ideal for soil moisture measurements in scientific and engineering experiments such as soil columns." The sensing waveguide portion is merely 6 cm long. That means the primary signal (excluding multiple reflection bounces, if such are useful) is only 0.4 nanosecond long in air, somewhat longer in the medium being sensed. That is much shorter than anything I ever looked at, or could look at with the equipment on hand.

 

If you were to consider:
http://www.ti.com/tool/EZ430-F2013


The Target Board is very affordable with:

• 4 analog inputs, 10 digital
• very low sleep current
• wide input voltage (easily photo cell-capacitor powered, zinc cell-capacitor)
• has an LED output light (flash counter or encoded data)
• one USB emulator can handled all the programming
• target board about the size of a USA quarter
• very affordable
• very rugged (automotive grade)

Are you thinking of the KeeYees soil moisture sensors?
https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/DFRobot%20PDFs/SEN0193_Web.pdf

Bob Wilson

 

I'll vouch for this series too, for very low power needs, at least as it existed before I retired.

I don't know if such low power is needed for the soil monitoring application, but if so, this series was in a different universe than the Arduino cards I used for something else. These TI units (the target board at the tip, not the whole USB dongle) can be used with ambient energy harvest if the software is carefully built.

The Arduinos I used were severe power hogs in comparison, requiring a plug-in power source (USB power adapter) for long term applications. Though much of that consumption was from the provided firmware environment, which could be tuned or rewritten (maybe some are already available) with energy conservation in mind. And the hardware I used was also not selected for lower power, there should be more choices now.

If a continuous or otherwise adequate power source is available, then I see no problem in staying with Arduino, no need to consume valuable effort chasing down microamps.