DIY outdoor device builds: experiences?

ESPHome
1

Hi,

I have been dabbling with building devices from esp32 prototype boards / chips on custom boards for a little while now, mostly indoors, which has worked very well.
For this season I have a couple of outdoor devices planned/in progress, I want to see if anyone wants to share their experience on what has worked for them or not, especially after a few years of working in an outdoor environment.

My current setup looks like this:
I have 240V to an outdoor, but dry shed, with a dedicated breaker.
Inside the shed, I have a decent 12V power supply. From this supply I run 12V (fused) to locations around my garden, the cable is protected inside a 20mm PP waterpipe and dug in where possible.

This cable then feeds into standard outdoor IP44 electric boxes, where I have 12v → 5v buck converters that feed into prototype boards.
I currently have GPIO sensors like break beam detector, some i2c modules, some relais / motor controllers, want to add some soil moisture detectors…
I am debating what kind of connector would work well inside the boxes between the modules and the esp32.

I use screw terminals for 12v and 5v power connections
for IO, dupont pin connections are very easy and cheap and work mostly okay, but I am wondering if they would hold up well outdoors?
I don’t really want to solder too much to allow easy maintenance.

sensors / wire connections that are exposed to the elements (like hall effect sensors) are potted into hotglue / sikaflex / epoxy.

My climate is mostly dry, but with a couple of big floods each year and high humidity in summer.

How are you going about it, would this hold up? What are some good ways to do this?

2

Hey,

It looks like a nice little setup and you seem to have everything thought out pretty well, in my view.

I run a couple of ESP32s in the garden, but they’re inside (almost) watertight boxes and runs on batteries.

So only advice I could give you right now is: Do not use dupont connectors (unless you glue them together in the final design or something). I would use connectors like Molex KK or JST - something that clicks together. In my experience; If something suddenly doesn’t work, it’s always a damn dupont connector - the female wont hold the male firmly anymore.

3

nice thanks for sharing.
My experience is similar actually : if something is not connecting well its the duponts. I did invest in some JST connectors, might prefer those, only when needing to run the sensor cable through sleeve or hole, they tent to be bulky.

4

Yes, I can see how the JST connectors might be too bulky. I often just put a tiny glob of hot glue on the dupont connections. That way they’ll stay put and still easy enough to take apart. I can’t see them being a problem otherwise, they should be fine to use in those weather conditions.

5

good idea, the other thing is, if you use the dupont connections in 2,3 or 4 pin headers instead of single pin, they tend to stick in better and last longer as well. I got my hands on some development boards that break the gpio each out in pin headers Signal - GND - VCC as well as providing 12v input directly with a dc jack plug that I am going to give a go for this.