A Sensor Network for Monitoring Sagebrush

Sagebrush volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions are of great interest to the scientific community. This project aims to develop a system for remote sensing of these VOC emissions for large-scale use. To do this a sensor tag was developed using an ESP32-based microcontroller called the TinyPICO along with a microSD card breakout board and BME680 temperature, humidity, pressure, and gas VOC Sensor. Future implementations have room for including a laser-induced graphene VOC transducer capable of reading the VOC emissions from the sagebrush. The TinyPICO comes with an onboard wireless antenna that allows for wireless communication using the ESP-NOW protocol. Using ESP-NOW a system was implemented that had remote sensors daisy chaining back to one central sensor tag that stored all data recorded amongst the sensors. Using this technique a large area can be remotely monitored without the need to check the other sensors along the chain.