[HN Gopher] Show HN: We open-sourced our compost monitoring tech
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Show HN: We open-sourced our compost monitoring tech
I'm from a compost tech startup (Monty Compost Co.) focused on
making composting more efficient for households and industrial
facilities. But our tech isn't just for composting-- it's a
versatile system that can be repurposed for a wide range of
applications. So, we've made it open source for anyone to
experiment with! One of the exciting things about our open-source
compost monitoring tech is its flexibility. You can connect it to
platforms like Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or other single-board
computers to expand its capabilities or integrate it into your own
projects. Our system includes sensors for: * Gas composition *
Temperature * Moisture levels * Air pressure All data can be
exported as CSV files for analysis. While it's originally built for
monitoring compost, the hardware and data capabilities are
versatile and could be repurposed for other applications (IoT,
environmental monitoring, etc.) Hacker's Guide to Monty Tech:
https://github.com/gtls64/MontyHome-Hackers-Guide If you're into
data, sensors, or creative tech hacks, we'd love for you to check
it out and let us know what you build!
Author : montycompostco
Score : 188 points
Date : 2024-11-21 01:30 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| wswope wrote:
| Thanks for posting!
|
| Out of curiosity, could you talk more about the practical utility
| of the sensor readings you get while monitoring compost? Temp and
| moisture seem straightforward, but e.g., does gas composition
| imply anything about C/N ratio, or does it check if the pile is
| going anoxic? Is air pressure a general proxy for decomposition
| rate?
|
| Also, have you changed any of your own composting practices due
| to what you've learned from your experience with monitoring?
| montycompostco wrote:
| To dive into the utility of the sensor readings-- The main gas
| we monitor is Total Volatile Organic Compounds (TVOCs), which
| act as a general proxy for decomposition activity. Combined
| with temperature data, this gives a strong indication of
| whether the activity is aerobic (a healthy compost pile) or
| anaerobic (not ideal and potentially smelly!). For example, a
| spike in TVOCs with decreasing oxygen availability often flags
| anaerobic conditions.
|
| In terms of air pressure, this is used as part of our pile turn
| events detection in our companion app Monty Mobile. The app
| also analyses other data to assess how changes in conditions
| (e.g., moisture levels, turning frequency) affect
| decomposition. For most users, though, the general proxy is
| plenty-- by identifying when a pile is "active" or "stalled,"
| they can tweak their process (e.g., adding browns, adjusting
| moisture, or aerating).
|
| Compost is incredibly diverse, and the results will vary
| depending on the setup (tumblers, bins, worm farms) and inputs
| (manure, food scraps, garden waste). That said, 24/7 data from
| our system helps streamline the behaviour-change process.
| Rather than relying on a "try-wait-try-again" approach, users
| get immediate feedback, which can be a game-changer for both
| beginners and seasoned composters.
|
| As for me, Monty has been a massive learning tool. Using the
| Monty Mobile app has personally helped me engage more with my
| compost pile and remember to add feedstock to adjust the pile
| when needed. It definitely makes me feel more in tune with
| what's going on!
|
| I hope this clarifies things! Happy to chat more :)
| wswope wrote:
| Great summary - tyvm!
|
| I can absolutely see how quick feedback from those metrics
| could help people dial in their maintenance.
| boredinstapanda wrote:
| Do you know if anyone is writing a HomeAssistant integration for
| this?
| montycompostco wrote:
| Not yet, but maybe you? :)
| diggan wrote:
| Sadly, it seems to be Bluetooth only, whose range isn't great
| unless you already have your garden covered. Probably late to
| ask, but would be cool if future versions also included a
| Zigbee radio and it will make it 1000 times easier to
| integrate into Home Assistant :)
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Assistant for those like me
| who have never heard of this software
| magicbuzz wrote:
| I love it, but surely just a temp gauge for running a hot compost
| is nice & simple? If mine is over 45C, I'm fairly sure that means
| the thermophiles are present and doing their thing
| montycompostco wrote:
| You're absolutely right-- a temperature gauge is a fantastic
| tool for monitoring for many composters who are focused on the
| basics of maintaining an active hot composting pile.
|
| Where our system shines is when you want to go a little deeper.
| For example, adding data on gas, moisture levels, and air
| pressure allows users to troubleshoot or optimise their process
| more effectively. Is the activity aerobic or anaerobic? Is your
| moisture level tipping the pile too far one way or another?
| These kinds of insights can help when composting setups or
| inputs get more complex, or when things stall and you're not
| sure why.
|
| That said, we totally get that not everyone needs all the bells
| and whistles--sometimes a reliable temp gauge and your
| composting instincts are all you need to make amazing, healthy
| compost!
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| How do you verify the expected metabolic processes are
| occurring that produce said temperatures?
| montycompostco wrote:
| Great question-- thanks for asking!
|
| Verifying the metabolic processes in composting is a bit of a
| mix between understanding composting fundamentals and
| interpreting the data we collect. The processes are highly
| dependent on factors like feedstock type and volume. For
| example, a sudden spike in temperature might be due to an
| addition of nitrogen-rich materials or a recent turning of
| the pile--both of which can accelerate microbial activity.
|
| While our sensors provide 24/7 data on temperature, gas
| composition, and more, there are always factors we can't
| directly see or control for, like the exact distribution of
| materials within the pile. That's where a bit of
| interpretation comes in: matching what the data is telling us
| with the fundamentals of composting.
|
| By combining real-time monitoring with an understanding of
| what's happening in the pile, users can make informed
| decisions to keep their composting process on track. It's not
| an exact science, but the extra data helps a lot!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I can barely get my compost more than 5C above ambient. But I
| think it is mainly because the compost bin isn't big enough
| (one of those black plastic daleks), so has too much surface
| area/volume. Also, it is in a very shady spot.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Shade shouldn't be a problem. In fact, a cover is good
| because it helps you control the sunlight and rain.
|
| If the pile isn't heating up it's usually either bone dry or
| there's not enough volume. Aim for at least one cubic meter
| (or 3x3x3 feet).
|
| If you have fresh grass clippings, add them - they will help
| a lot. A heap of grass clippings with nothing else will heat
| up on its own (but don't do it because it will smell).
|
| Your cold compost is going to be fine, it will just take
| longer and won't cook the weed seeds. If you have more
| questions there's a composting subreddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/composting/
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Thanks, I have done a bit of research of carbon:nitrogen
| etc. I think it is lack of volume. it still produces good
| compost, just takes longer.
| westurner wrote:
| collectd is an open source monitoring system which can record to
| e.g. RRD flat files or SQLite and can forward collected metrics
| to SIEM-like monitoring and charting and anomaly detection apps
| like Grafana or InfluxDB.
|
| Nagios has "state flaping detection" to prevent spurious
| notifications.
|
| collectd-python-plugins includes Python scripts for monitoring
| humidity and temp with i2c sensors and Python:
| https://github.com/dbrgn/collectd-python-plugins
|
| There are LoraWAN soil moisture sensors, but they require
| batteries or an in-field charging method
|
| "Satellite images of plants' fluorescence can predict crop
| yields" (2024)
|
| "Sensor-Free Soil Moisture Sensing Using LoRa Signals (2022)"
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3534608 ..
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=40234912
|
| /? open source soil moisture sensor:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+soil+moisture+se...
| westurner wrote:
| /? crop monitoring wikipedia:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=crop+monitoring+wikipedia ...
|
| Precision agriculture:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_agriculture
|
| Digital agriculture:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_agriculture
|
| /? crop monitoring system site:github.com
| https://www.google.com/search?q=crop+monitoring+system+site%...
|
| SIEM:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_information_and_event...
| montycompostco wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing these resources--this is fantastic!
|
| If you're into LoRaWAN, you might be interested to hear that
| we're also developing an industrial composting monitor that
| incorporates LoRaWAN tech. Here's the promo video link if you'd
| like to check it out:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZFiiwLhZh8&feature=youtu.be
| westurner wrote:
| Can your sensor product feed data to open source software for
| hobbyist and professional agriculture?
|
| I set up FarmOS in a container once; the PWA approach to the
| offline mobile app was cool but I guess I wasn't that
| committed to manual data collection or hobbyist gardening.
|
| Are there open standards to support architectural sensor
| data?
|
| Where is the identifier on the sensor? How does the user scan
| the visually-confirmable sensor barcode or QR code or similar
| and associate that with a garden bed or a container?
|
| How does it notify of low battery status; is there a voltage
| reading to predict the out of battery condition?
|
| Is there a configurable polling interval?
|
| How do I find a sensor unit with a dead battery; is there a
| low-power chirp, or do I need a metal detector or very
| directional wireless sensors and triangulation or
| trilateration?
|
| Are there nooks and crannies in the casing?
|
| How to replace the battery?
|
| Can they be made out of compostable materials? E.g. carbon
| with existing nanofabrication capabilities
|
| After Single Walled Twisted Carbon Nanotube batteries which
| are unfortunately still only in the lab, and more practically
| Sodium Ion, which batteries can safely be discarded or
| recycled in the agricultural field?
|
| LoRaWAN may be more economical than multiple directional long
| range WiFi antenna like can be found on YouTube.
| https://youtu.be/GWq6L94ImX8
|
| Notes on LoRa and OpenWRT, which also supports rtl-sdr,
| BATMAN wifi mesh networking, and (dual) Mini PCIe 4G radios:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22735933
| montycompostco wrote:
| Adding to the main post--
|
| You can check out the Monty Monitor here:
| https://montycompost.co/products/im-perfect-monty-monitor
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Hi!
|
| Which manufacturer/model sensors are you using? I have made some
| environmental monitoring with very cheap sensors for some hobby
| projects, but have very bad experience on repeatability of the
| sensor reading, or for CO2 sensors even noise tolerance (was also
| dicussed on HN, that discussion made me realize that noise is the
| cause of the problems, and have managed to verify that).
|
| I have some project ideas beyond my at-home breadboard
| prototyping but to go beyond I'd rather build on reliable
| components as the software/infra side is maturing now.
| montycompostco wrote:
| For Monty's system, we use sensors from Bosch and Sensirion.
| During our initial prototyping phase, we tested around 20
| different types of sensors and found they had the most workable
| results across a range of composting environments.
|
| Feel free to share more about your project ideas-- happy to
| dive deeper if it helps!
| 9dev wrote:
| Ohh, interesting. I've long wanted to do an adjacent project,
| that is, creating a monitoring system for plants. Like, a single
| spike in the pot that measures soil composition, nutrient levels,
| moisture, wind speed, light exposure, humidity, etc. to give both
| plant care recommendations and optimise growth. Never got around
| doing it tho...
|
| Do you have recommendations for buying sensors?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i did a hobby project like this for soil moisture. here's a
| messy repo that i made when i could barely code. it points to
| some capacitive sensor guides.
| https://github.com/smcalilly/sensor
| ramon156 wrote:
| Haha, I actually did a project on this last month with arduinos.
| Cool to see an open-sourced project for this
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Why do you need to monitor compost?
| jy14898 wrote:
| To monitor the compost
| bagels wrote:
| To ensure the pile is actually composting effectively.
| exDM69 wrote:
| I need to monitor my compost to keep it from freezing in the
| winter. Probably not what OP's system is for, given that they
| are from Australia.
|
| The biological processes produce enough heat to keep the
| thermally insulated compost bin from freezing easily down to
| -15C (~5 F). But this requires that there isn't too much
| finished compost in the bin that won't produce heat any more,
| so any turn downwards on the thermometer means I'm probably
| late in emptying the bin. Which happens every year when it gets
| cold (below -20C/-5F), but can be remedied by a 40W light bulb
| for 48 hours to heat up and restart the composting.
|
| Another thing that needs to be monitored is humidity, because
| too humid and the compost goes anaerobic and starts rotting
| instead of composting. This I "monitor" by smell but this
| project has some kind of gas composition sensor which could be
| useful. I don't have issues with this any more as I have
| practically unlimited supply of wood chips to keep it dry.
|
| But the wood chips bring another problem which is pH levels
| that may go too low. Here's where I'd really like to have a
| monitor so I could estimate if I need to do something to adjust
| the pH.
| duckmysick wrote:
| > But the wood chips bring another problem which is pH levels
| that may go too low.
|
| Is this something you've measured? I add a lot of wood chips
| and conifer needles and it's not a problem; the compost ends
| up between 6 and 7.5 pH (neutral is 7). I also liberally
| spread woodchips on the paths between the beds and things are
| fine.
|
| The effects of wood mulch on plants and composts are well
| understood:
|
| https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pub/ec-1629-mulchi.
| ..
|
| If want to change the pH of your soil you need something
| stronger, like sulphur or lime.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I don't.
|
| My most-productive compost operation mostly just consisted of
| just piling stuff up beside my brick shed, which was
| conveniently near an outside door on my kitchen.
|
| The rest of the process consisted of giving it a bit of a toss
| with a hoe, a shovel, or a fork if I was outside, bored, and
| felt like doing that, or giving it a bit of water from the
| garden hose if it had been very hot and dry. And I did as
| little of this as possible because taking care of compost,
| while certainly interesting to me, is just not something I
| generally enjoy doing.
|
| I really didn't pay much attention to it.
|
| By the time spring came 'round again and I had a use for the
| stuff, I had plenty of it for the garden.
|
| And this worked very well -- for me, on my scale, in my region,
| with my needs.
|
| Therefore, I do not need to monitor my compost.
|
| ---
|
| But not all composting operations are lazy. Sometimes, they are
| very active. And some operations are large enough (or the
| available space small enough) that real estate becomes a
| seriously-limiting factor.
|
| And in these instances, optimizing the process to get higher-
| quality compost _faster_ can become a very desirable goal.
|
| Optimization of composting is not dissimilar to optimization of
| any other process, wherein: Having some good data is better
| than having no data.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Not wanting to minimise your product, it's not something I
| personally would need. But I'm curious if you looked at what
| scale of composting would be needed for electronic monitoring to
| improve the final product enough to pay off the investment? It
| feels like it would have to be very large scale?
|
| I like the mushroom vibe on your domestic design, it feels like
| you could have leant into that a bit more even. Cool beans.
| sudokita wrote:
| Love this! Hurray for more comprehensive and extensible smaller-
| scale compost monitoring. You might find some additional interest
| from our Gathering for Open Ag Tech community
| (https://forum.goatech.org/).
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| This gives me an idea. We have a very large compost pile from
| mucking out various horse stalls and pens. It's mainly composed
| of urine-soaked woodchips and mostly broken-down horse manure.
| There's also some dirt in there as well. As an experiment this
| summer, I tried growing potatoes and carrots in it. Potatoes did
| extremely well, the carrots not so much (but I attribute that to
| poor watering).
|
| It would be interesting to monitor the temperature to see how
| active it still is, since I can tell that it's not completely
| broken down yet. I actually have an ESP8266-based temperature
| sensor around here that I was using to track ambient temp for
| another fermentation project.
|
| Now I'm thinking of encapsulating its thermistor and putting the
| 8266 in an IP67 enclosure along with a solar cell and just
| planting the whole lot on top of the compost pile. It already
| serves a web page on a .local domain so there would be minimal
| work required on my part.
|
| I might actually get to that this weekend!
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| It's the urine. Try sun bleaching it by spreading out the piles
| to get rid of the ammonia.
| owl_vision wrote:
| Underline that. As I learnt it, compost mostly benefits from
| drying, baking it in the sun.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Ammonia is produced when there is excess nitrogen. More
| carbon is needed if there is ammonia. You want to capture as
| much of the nitrogen as possible. Sun bleaching just bakes
| the ammonia off and kills the microbiota of the compost.
|
| Compost troubleshooting guide: - smells like sewer = not
| enough oxygen - smells like ammonia = not enough carbon -
| smells sweet/fungal = just right
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| The soil might have actually been too rich for carrots. In my
| experience with too much nitrogen grow great tops but the root
| doesn't form properly.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Interesting. That's exactly what happened.
| jlengrand wrote:
| Was coming here to say that. Agreed. Carrots need poor soil
| (and love sand for example).
| pipe2devnull wrote:
| I don't know how you read my mind because completely randomly I
| was just looking at thermocouples for compost monitoring.
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