boilerController VS dorothy

I built the controller for my wood gasification boiler, https://github.com/DusteDdk/boilerController

it sits in series with the regular controls, but allows me to start the fire and leave without needing to come back "after a while" to set the "turn off" temperature, it also fixes the issue of hysteresis where, after the furnace is empty of fuel, it will shut off due to cold air being drawn through, cooling the sensor enough to shut off, only to have the thermal mass of the boiler itself make the temperature rise above the turn-on threshold, which adds tens of power on/off cycles to the motor, on top of being annoying to listen to.

The wireless part is optional, but I use it to draw a temperature curve, so I can see when the right time to refuel is, if needed.

This is a really cool idea for lots of reasons, but especially because you could leave sensors buried forever. This lends itself well to long term soil monitoring, which is a somewhat unsolved problem (especially in no-till environments).

Agriculture is a harsh place for sensitive electronics. My approach has been to make them cheap enough to be nearly disposable (shameless plug, https://github.com/alexose/dorothy), but this still requires a lot of human intervention to keep everything chirping.

I built out a remote sensing platform using ESP32 + LoRa. The attempt was to hit the sweet spot between cheap, easy, and reliable:

https://github.com/alexose/dorothy