Moisture Bricklet¶

Features¶

• Measures soil moisture

• 12bit resolution

Description¶

The Moisture Bricklet is intended to measure moisture in soil. It can extend Bricks by this feature. It is also possible to use the Moisture Bricklet as a detector for water filling level.

Since hardware version 1.1 a capacitive method of measurement is used. The previous method of measurement used bare metal contacts that could result in a corrosion problem.

Technical Specifications¶

Resources¶

• Schematic (Download)

• Outline and drilling plan (Download)

• Source code and design files (Download)

• 3D model (View online | Download: STEP, FreeCAD)

Test your Moisture Bricklet¶

To test a Moisture Bricklet you need to have Brick Daemon and Brick Viewer installed. Brick Daemon acts as a proxy between the USB interface of the Bricks and the API bindings. Brick Viewer connects to Brick Daemon. It helps to figure out basic information about the connected Bricks and Bricklets and allows to test them.

Connect the Moisture Bricklet to a Brick with a Bricklet Cable.

If you connect the Brick to the PC over USB, you should see a new tab named "Moisture Bricklet" in the Brick Viewer after a moment. Select this tab. If everything went as expected you can now see changes of the moisture value.

After this test you can go on with writing your own application. See the Programming Interface section for the API of the Moisture Bricklet and examples in different programming languages.

Corrosion problem with hardware version 1.0¶

Hardware version 1.0 of the Moisture Bricklets used bare metal contacts to measure the soil moisture. Some customers ran into corrosion problems with this setup. Because of this, hardware version 1.1 now uses a capacitive method of measurement without bare metal contacts. Therefore, corrosion can not occur anymore.

Case¶

A laser-cut case for the Moisture Bricklet was available.

The assembly is easiest if you follow the following steps:

• Screw spacers to the Bricklet,

• build up side plates and put them around Bricklet,

• screw bottom plate to bottom spacers,

• screw top plate to top spacers.

Below you can see an exploded assembly drawing of the Moisture Bricklet case:

Hint: There is a protective film on both sides of the plates, you have to remove it before assembly.

Programming Interface¶

See Programming Interface for a detailed description.