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?