Doing a school assignment on a very general topic, I chose to do things around farming and it's destructive effects/how to help it using low-cost technologies. Been doing research into the possibilities of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) sensors as a mesh network to help map out soil nutrient levels.
From what I have seen, NPK sensors seem to be quite expensive, going in the range of hundreds. But there are models on aliexpress for under $30, so I assume it may just be a matter of distribution and manufacturing may not be that expensive. Soil moisture sensors are obviously much cheaper and can be directly built into the main PCB for such a device.
Then use something like LoRa to set them all up in a mesh network, and it seems like this could be viable for putting, say, 1 sensor every 2 or 3 acres, depending on the size of the field. Assuming $40 per sensor if there is a way to get cheap NPK detectors, that means only $1000 to cover an 80 acre field...which would pay for itself in the savings for water and the yeild after the correct amount of soil nutrients is added. Probably.
As with most things like this, actually mass-producing would be much cheaper than making a prototype per sensor, because of deals with suppliers for the sensor and such.
I am probably going to do a follow-up look into this after the assignment because I am still very interested with all this.
@mightyspaceman I’ve looked into this as well and from my uneducated understanding the method for determining the soil health of a plot of land requires multiple samples every X number of feet/meters. I came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to build one unit with the sensors and GPS that used LORA to transmit and an RTLSDR to receive. I found similar commercial solutions in the $8k range so there’s a market here for alternatives.
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