Project Freya: Overview

I wanted to give my little Arduino project a proper name. And with it coming along in leaps and bounds I figured it was about time to give it a good one.

So, Project Freya. Freya being the Norse goddess of love and fertility. Fertility being the key here as it’s to be used on a farm to assess fields… (So soil fertility)

Basically the outline of the project is for a device that does the following:

• Records the coordinates for a given position
• Records soil moisture taken from a probe/set of probes
• Logs both of these values onto something that enables easy translation into a GIS program, in my case ESRI’s ArcMap.

My platform of choice is the Arduino (From www.arduino.cc)

I picked up the Arduino Uno Starter Kit.

I figured I’d do all the tutorials and so forth and get my hand in to the language. I did the first tutorial and decided to free lance from there.

The first part of the requirement was for GPS reception:
For this I got an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Logger Shield. http://www.adafruit.com/products/1272

The advantage of this is that it fills both the first and third requirement, GPS and SD card. Perfect!

I wrecked the board whilst soldering on the pins though, I stuck on standard male pins, then realised I actually needed some of the inputs to run the sensors and later the LCD screen, so I had to unsolder the pins and put header pins on, and broke some of the tracks in the process. Note: if you are using this board, choose header pins straight away and don’t even try and solder on normal pins…

 

My moisture sensors are very simple, and partially described in the previous post. The circuit diagram can be seen here:

These are the actual probes of the sensor. Two nails soldered to wires. These will be mounted to something, maybe a broom handle, with some method of ensuring that each sample site the probes are inserted the same distance from each other and to the same depth.

That’s the basics of the project. It has expanded from these few key parts a bit now, see later posts about that though!

-Skipper