Shannon Hicks

According to the manual, the EC-TM probes behave the same as the 5TM probes except that they do not have temperature. On the probes there are 3 wires – one is ground, one is excitation, and one is the digital signal from the sensor. Basically you send a quick pulse on the excitation line and a serial data string can be read on the data line. The Arduino board will have to parse the string to get a raw value and then apply that value to a formula to calculate water content. The code I’ve been using can do all that, and I’ll be posting it here very soon.

Hi everyone, sorry for the lack of updates lately. January was a hectic month with us hosting a large workshop on data management for Critical Zone science. I’m away all this week at a workshop on optical water quality sensors. I’ve also been taking advantage of the relatively mild winter to get lots of field work done and new loggers deployed. The sensor and datalogger project is pretty much a one-man-band, with me doing all of the design, building, testing, calibrating, deployment, maintenance, and documentation. So lately I’ve been doing everything on that list except for updating and publishing our documentation, but soon I hope to share more details on this site. Thanks for your patience.

That’s a good question. I have had several requests for information about how to interface Arduino circuits with sensors from Decagon Devices. That will be one of the first topics I’ll tackle in the next couple of days. What type of soil moisture probe are you using?