// the find
ovidiu4/smart-plant-monitor
Not your average Soil Moisture Sensor
A complete DIY plant moisture monitor built around the ESP32-S3, shipping PCB gerbers, 3D-printable case STLs, BOM, and Arduino firmware. Targets makers who want a finished, deployable thing rather than a breadboard prototype — the card-edge soil probe connector and e-paper display are deliberate design choices, not afterthoughts.
The replaceable soil probe via card-edge connector is the smartest part of the design — soil PCBs corrode and die, so making them swap-out cheap bare PCBs is exactly right. Gerbers plus pick-and-place CSV plus BOM means you can send this straight to JLCPCB without doing any design work yourself. Using the ESP32-S3's native touch peripheral for capacitive sensing avoids the usual dedicated IC and keeps the board small. Home Assistant integration is built into the firmware, not bolted on.
Last commit was July 2023 and the README says 'ongoing' — that combination means you're probably on your own if something breaks. The Arduino code is split across multiple .ino files in a versioned folder (1.3.3) with no clear path to updates, which makes tracking changes a mess. No calibration procedure is documented beyond 'done in software,' which matters a lot for capacitive soil sensing where readings vary wildly between soil types. Commercial use restriction in the README is a non-standard license situation that could be a problem if you're building anything to sell or share.