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Show HN: We open-sourced our compost monitoring tech

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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!

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!

18 hours agoby HeyLaughingBoy

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.

22 hours agoby pbhjpbhj

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.

1 day agoby fodkodrasz

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/).

20 hours agoby sudokita

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

1 day agoby magicbuzz

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?

1 day agoby 9dev

I don’t know how you read my mind because completely randomly I was just looking at thermocouples for compost monitoring.

16 hours agoby pipe2devnull

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?

1 day agoby wswope

Adding to the main post--

You can check out the Monty Monitor here: https://montycompost.co/products/im-perfect-monty-monitor

1 day agoby montycompostco

Do you know if anyone is writing a HomeAssistant integration for this?

1 day agoby boredinstapanda

Haha, I actually did a project on this last month with arduinos. Cool to see an open-sourced project for this

1 day agoby ramon156

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...

1 day agoby westurner

Why do you need to monitor compost?

23 hours agoby lofaszvanitt