Buying, Programming, and Testing Capacitance Soil Moisture Sensors

UPDATE 7/1/2023 : The suggested sensor range thresholds in this video assume a linear response to soil moisture. Be aware these sensor do not respond in a linear fashion to soil volumetric water content (VWC). My experiments demonstrate a 60% reduction in VWC yields no change on sensor response. Experiments and further details summarized here:    • Calibrating Soil Moisture Sensors for...  

UPDATE 2/8/2023 : Thanks to Hackaday for picking this video up.
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/01/compa...

Additional chapters in development and being tracked here:    • Soil Monitoring Experiments  

Original description:

This video begins my exploration of capacitive soil moisture sensors for use as a tool in water conservation in planned communities. This is the first of many chapters investigating this technology.

Code and spreadsheet used in calculating ranges is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tIYq...

Flaura's excellent summary is available here:
Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensors don't work correctly + Fix for v2.0 v1.2 Arduino ESP32 Raspberry Pi :    • Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensors don'...  

The wiring for connecting the sensor to the microcontroller is fairly simple: red (anode wire) to positive socket on the microcontroller, black (cathode wire) to negative socket on the microcontroller, and yellow (signal wire) to analog pin A0.

Enjoy!