

Garduino Rotary Phone: Saving my garden using Twilio, Arduino and Sinatra - jarodreyes
https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014/06/garduino-phone-using-twilio-arduino-and-sinatra.html

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stcredzero
Temperature sensing and microphones are literally dirt cheap. Moisture sensing
is a bit harder. Are there any off the shelf solutions that recharge using
solar, sense temperature, and can attach themselves to your WiFi? Even better:
Any that use Cellular networking?

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polytap
There are not, though I am building such a thing.

RF-equipped sensors (315 or 433 Mhz) transmitting to a GPRS or WiFi enabled
hub would be best.

A fairly affordable foundation for that in Arduino-land would be the Fio or
the LilyPad USB -- both of which have the LiPo charger.

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stcredzero
_There are not, though I am building such a thing._

Are you in Texas?

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polytap
SoCal.

The professional/industrial environmental sensor market sucks.

Pretty much any sensor offering high precision is sold exclusively through
authorized resellers that in turn hold the logged data captive and liberate it
manually through what amount to expensive professional services contracts.

I'd like to smash that.

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stcredzero
So how about low-power units in something like a NEMA23 form factor with some
liPo batteries and a solar cell, with some rare earth magnets on the back? Put
a cellular modem with GPS in it, and sell it through a website, where you can
assign units to "flocks" or "clouds" and look at their data on a Google Earth
style interface. So long as the bandwidth use is kept low enough, this can be
done economically and within a power budget that would let these things run
indefinitely.

Just having thermometers and microphones would enable a ton of uses. Like, how
about in the energy industry, where FFT analysis of machinery sounds could be
used for basic health monitors? You could sell a ton of those to the Energy
Industry and they wouldn't bat an eye at $100 a unit. Just the ability to tell
people to distribute them, then handle everything else from a website would be
worth way more than $100 a unit for them. (The employment qualification bar
for the more remote energy industry jobs is _very_ low.)

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blacksmith_tb
Doesn't seem like the rotary phone case will protect it very much from the
environment (water around it carefully, I suppose, but what if you get a
downpour?) Not sure what you can do if the temperature is the problem you're
notified about, either...

