LilyGO has made plenty of ESP32 “TTGO” boards with various features be it PoE, battery support, OLED display, cellular connectivity, and even a devkit in watch form factor.
The latest product from the company specifically targets smart farming/gardening as TTGO T-Higrow embeds either DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor or BME280 temperature, humidity, and barometric sensor to report soil temperature and moisture over Bluetooth or WiFi. It can also come as a kit with a battery and a 3D printed enclosure.
TTGO T-Higrow board specifications:
- SoC – Espressif Systems ESP32 dual-core LX6 processor @ up to 240 MHz with 520 LB SRAM, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth
- Storage – 4MB QSPI flash
- Wireless
- 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 up to 150 Mbps
- Bluetooth 4.2 BR/EDR and BLE
- Sensors
- Option 1 – DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor
- Option 2 – BME280 temperature, humidity, and barometric sensor
- Expansion –
- 2x 12-pin through holes with UART, SPI, SDIO, I2C, PWM, I2S, IR, GPIOs, capacitive touch sensing, ADC, ADC
- 4-pin I2C connector for external waterproof sensors
- Debugging – CP2104 USB to TTL chip
- Misc – 1x user button, 1x wake up button, 40MHz crystal oscillator
- Power Supply
- 5V/1A via USB-C port
- 2-pin header for 3.7 Lithium battery; TP4054 charging chip
- Power Consumption – Operating: about 150 mA; sleep current: 220 uA
- Temperature Range – -40°C to +85°C
- Dimensions – 155 x 35 x 8.2 mm
- Weight – 13.65g
The company provides Arduino sample code showing sensor data in a web interface, firmware file, PDF schematics, 3D print files, and other documentation on Github.
The board ships with unsoldered headers and the battery cable, but there’s also a kit with the DHT11 or BME280 version of TTGO T-Higrow that adds a 3D printed case and a 200 mAh battery.
I could not find any information about battery life, as it will depend on the implementation and most notably how long the board stays in deep sleep mode before it wakes up to report sensors data to your IoT gateway or selected cloud service. I can see deep sleep is implemented using the user button in the demo code.
LilyGO sells TTGO Higrow boards and kits for $9.92 to $16.23 on Aliexpress.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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This thing won’t last long outside exposed to the elements….look at Plaid Systems Spruce moisture sensor gen 3 if you need something like this… Zigbee
Obviously it is for indoor and unfair to compare with a product that cost over $50
Read more carefully. “The latest product from the company specifically targets smart farming/gardening as TTGO T-Higrow embeds”. It’s fair
Bad fact checking as only CNXSoft blog mention farming and gardening as potential uses. The developer/manufacturer themself does not mention farming or gardening. Besides, there is more to farming and gardening than planting outside. Anyway, whoever uses that device outside without waterproof shell should just based on the look of it assume that it will stop working sooner rather than later.
I don’t fact-check CNX. Your opinion on that is vacuous. Regardless, if this device is exposed to humid environment or moisture as would be expected in any growing environment it’s unprotected electronics will corrode and fail eventually.
Supported by Tasmota or ESPHome firmware?