Through the help of Dr. Jay Ham's lab here at Colorado State University, I've had the pleasure of contributing to the development of novel, low-cost, soil sensors that measure temperature and moisture through capacitance. I've personally been leading agricultural field testing of these devices while working at the Irrigation Innovation Consortium by hosting three interns through the CSU Extension Internship program. Our project focused on calibrating the sensors to commercial sensors, and moisture readings from manual soil samples and a neutron density gauge. The result of my work and other students has led to the creation of a new company, SoilSignal, which will allow us to continue the production of our sensors in a sustainable way.

When I first started working in the Fairmont District, we installed soil moisture and salinity sensors in the fields to monitor irrigation and salt movement over the growing season. Unfortunately, I had several of the data loggers crash without my knowledge and caused me to lose a month's worth of data! To overcome this, I invested some time in developing a remote way to monitor my data to avoid unexpected crashes. I did this through some simple C++ programming and the use of cellular microcontrollers from Particle. Now my data is connected to the cloud!

A second IoT project that I added to the research site, was an irrigation detection sensor. Part of my research involves collecting regular water samples during irrigation events to quantify the salts being deposited onto the field. Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing when an irrigation event was occurring without calling the farmer directly, making this a frustrating/time consuming process. I used another cellular microcontroller from Particle and a cheap capacitive soil moisture sensor, to make a device that would email when water was detected in the field instead.