Soil temperatures with DS18B20

Hi
Having just replaced my Davis ISS I wanted to monitor soil temperatures but I can’t justify the costs of the required davis kit to intergrate this with the ISS.

I have since briefly messed about with a DS18B20 waterproof sensor and an Arduino and also a Raspberry Pi which there are simple instructions on the web to set up to record temperatures but the measurements are only available on a local monitor for the Pi or using the serial monitor on the Arduino.

What would be ideal would be to add an ethernet connection to either of the boards and then send it out on the internet to be viewed graphically (if possible). It looks like it has been done but the instructions for doing this are either incredibly complicated or not always complete - I 'm a keen amateur and NOT a programmer so some of the solutions are double dutch to me!! Has anyone done this in a SIMPLE way??

Another option would it is possible would be to interface the DS18B20 with the PC running WD and use that to produce the graph/records?

The stand alone Arduino/Pi option and not interfacing it with WD would not be a major disadvantage as I am really only interested in the soil temperature reaching 8deg C in the spring when I would be looking to put fertiliser on the fields and I have the ability to connect to the internet close to where I would monitor temperatures, but it might be nice to add this to the WD data.

Cheers

David

I bought a USB<–>1-wire interface (e.g. eBay) and a set of waterproof Dallas temperature sensors. You can connect a temperature sensor directly to the 1-wire interface. In your PC, make sure to install proper FTD drivers so your (Windows) Operating System recognises the interface and assign a (virtual) COM port. In WD, tick the option that you want to use a 1-wire sensor with your weather station. Then, open a dallas1wirereader and let it know the COM port of the 1-wire interface. Click Save/Reset - in the middle panel you will see that the reader recognised your 1-wire interface and the sensors that are connected to it. Select & Copy the sensor ID (long string) and Paste it to e.g. “Extra temperature 1” lower right. Again, Save/Reset. That’s it. In the %dallasextratemp1% tag (writing out of my head), you will read the soil temperature.

The proper way is actually to run the dallas1wirereader with WD stopped to save the settings. In WD, there is also an option to tell that Extra temp 1 is a “Soil temperature”. Just look around and you will see (I’m not next to my PC right now). In case it doesn’t work, I can post screenshots.

I put one sensor to 5 cm (2in) and the other at 30 cm (1f2in) depth. Once you have a cable out there, you can connect many sensors in parallel.

Hope it works well for you.