“A good, but somewhat unfinished product. Overall, it's a solid product that is easy to get up and running. The provisioning script helps get the initial configuration all set up. With not much work, I was able to receive readings on my home assistant instance via mqtt. However, I'm not doing a science project or proof of concept. I wanting to build a full fledged auto-watering system and this is where it falls short.
First miss- It would have been nice to have one of more of the currently unused gpio pins available for a water tank level input. I bare soldered the connections to gpio 16 and a ground pin and that works. but looks a bit cludgy and is a potential weak point for failure. Also seemed wastefull to use the qw/st connector to go to another board just to get a binary input. I suppose I could have reprogrammed the qw/st connector to be just a gpio rather than i2c, but I think it better to leave it as intended.
Second miss. Maybe it's there, but I couldn't find any documention or examples to show how to communicate TO the grow device. With a lot of work, I figured it out and will post my solution at some point. I do have a feeling, without any guidance, my implementation follows worst practices vs best practices. But I needed to do something; in a production system, it's not practical to have to pull the board down, run over to a pc, launch thorny, just to change some run time configurations such as how often to take a reading. Clear documentation and examples should be provided for 2 way communication.
All that said, this is so far better than having to start with a bare pico and build the hardware support on my own. This got me 80% of the way there, but that last 20% was a climb.
Overall, I would recommend as a great experimental board, and a good prodution board for those willing to put in the work to extend the capabilities for that purpose.”
“The device is very handy and does its job as expected.
The free enviro.io plan is a bit limited, but there are easy guides yo setup your mqtt or fluxdb store.
It would be nice to be able to reconfigure the parameters (frequency, thresholds, enable/disable watering) without having to plug the device in a computer, but memory is limited so probably not feasible”
“It's a great tiny little device, which fits everywhere and provides great data, plus with 3 pumps incredible finctionslity.
Just make sure to get wires and pipes of the right length for your environment”
“Expect a few hours of work to understand how it works and the quirks. But then works quite well. I plan to order another one when there will be available again. The icing on the cake was discovering how little code is necessary to make everything work”
