meadandale and barnaby33, Thanks for the RF suggestion. Is my understanding correct that RF is used to collect data from the sensors to transmit to the base station? I presume the base station has a data display or logger. Is the sensor data accessible in an online portal transmitted via RF?

The moisture data does not need much security for transmission. I just like to cross off potential use cases by starting with a secure network requirement.

Hatfield, Thanks for the Ubiquity link. Their products have opened up a whole new world for me! Air Fiber looks promising. I am still reading up on the potential use cases. One aspect I haven’t found is do products like air fiber support data uploads to say a server hosted on ec2? I suppose there also needs to be some ISP for the input data feed. The few articles I read discussed configuring a pair of air fiber units to share bandwidth and transmit data across a collection of buildings w/o touching the public internet.

moneymaker, Thanks for the Brillo suggestion. Will explore the option.

Hobie and FlyerInHi, Thanks for the encouragement! I think there is potential. For my home project I started with a general concept and fumbled my way through arduino and few different sensors to get to the initial version. It was a fun project, and got me exploring domains I had no prior experience in.

For the next version I have few different ideas, but I find I need to pace my ideas and focus one requirement at a time. This project needs a lot of learning and research on topics I am not familiar with and that seems to be the challenging aspect. My background is working magic on data from 80 or 443 for web and mobile UX. For now I am just picking one visible end of the woolen ball with the hope once unravelled I will have a working proof of concept.

For now I don’t see making any money off this project, and the PoC will be self funded. If I can manage to build a useful product, I might have couple of prospective customers and/or beta users.

Thanks again for all your suggestions, and sorry about the delay with my response. I started writing something earlier in the week and got distracted.

Not sure if this is appropriate… I think there is a lot of collective knowledge in this group, and if you don’t mind me asking silly questions along the way I could use your help! Like I mentioned there is not much money to be made atm, and if it does turn into something interesting, I am more than happy to share the outcome (or at least a case of your favorite beverage!). In case this were to happen Rich gets a percentage for providing an excellent forum :-). If this is of interest PM me.