Garden Guard: keep your plants healty and strong <3

This is an Low Cost Project because I made a mistake (or AliExpress fool me) buying a Raspberry Pi Pico W for 4 USD, but it was CLONED board. That's mean the native WiFi driver doesn't work.

So I tried differents solutions (some of them are bellow), but to use WiFi and "easy" MQTT conection this is what work for me.

Requierements

• Clonned Raspeberry Pi Pico W with esp8285 wifi chip
• Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor
• esptool
• Ubuntu 22.04
• (if you need as me) custome Firmware for esp8285.

Just WiFI

You can use this code right away. Don't be shy

This code also is usefull to check your firmware version.

WiFi + MQTT (need your this repo)

If your version is lower than V2.0, you need to follow this steps.

Drop this pass-through code on you RPI Pico W. It's a code to "connect direct" to the second microcontroller.

    sudo apt instal esptool

Now you can check your chip, remember press the button (that one far from usb port) while you're plugging your pico board.

# Check your chip, crystal oscillator 
#Remember ajust the port
esptool --port /dev/ttyACM0 chip_id

Now run this in the shell to

# First erase everything
esptool --port /dev/ttyACM0 erase_flash

# Now, updated the new one, please check the port, chip, baudrate, crystal oscillator and flash_size have to be 1MB
esptool --port /dev/ttyACM0 --chip esp8266 --baud 115200  write_flash 
        --flash_mode dout --flash_freq 26m --flash_size 1MB 
        0x0000  docs/ESP_AT_Firmware_V2.2.0.bin 

now, check again your firmware version, should show "V2.0.0".

Thanks to:

• rp2040 with esp8285
• Custom Compiled ESP-AT Firmware Binaries