I have been working on a monitoring and alert system for my garden. Something that can read the soil temperature and moisture content while running from the sun. 

I have been learning electronics as a hobby for couple of years and have acquired different types microcontrollers; arduino, raspberry pi, ESP8266.  After a bunch of trial and error I began to really settle on the ESP, specifically the wemos d1 mini program with the Arduino ide. 

This project was put into a cheap sealed ammo box with a waterproof crimp port for the connecting wires for probes into soil. There is a TP4056 charger circuit that takes the 5v power from the solar cell to charge the battery. 

The wemos is programmed to send values to software called influxdb that stores these values and have configure software Grafana to report against it. This is what will be used to send text message to water the garden. 

Currently in a one week test or until battery dies test before building final board and deploy for the garden’s season. 

If all goes well,  phase 2 would be have gutter fill a rain collector that would feed a soaker hose to water when needed or until out of water..