# Real devices to test against, without owning them *Written 2026-10-13, from a question: are there sites, vendors' or others', that give free access to hardware's data, so fieldmesh can be tested before a farm has any? Each was tried, or its documentation read, on that day.* | source | what it gives | access | in fieldmesh | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **[openSenseMap](https://docs.opensensemap.org/)** | every reading of thousands of citizen stations, some with soil probes: on 2026-10-13, 19 had reported soil water in the last day, from TRUEBNER SMT50s and Dragino LSE01s | open REST API, no key; data under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence 1.0 | **built**: `tools/opensensemap_collect.py` reads a station's soil series into a log, through the quality checks | | **OpenSprinkler's own firmware, demo build** | the real controller firmware, run on Linux with no hardware: its web API and its MQTT messages | GPL-3.0 source; `make VERSION=DEMO`, or its Dockerfile with `BUILD_VERSION=DEMO` | **checked**: the MQTT bridge's OpenSprinkler profile against what 2.2.1(6) published (`tools/fixtures/opensprinkler-demo-mqtt.log`) | | **[Synoptic Data](https://synopticdata.com/mesonet-api), Open Access** | public weather networks' stations, current and past, including state mesonets' and SCAN's soil moisture | free account and token | not built; NRCS SCAN is already read directly (`tools/scan_collect.py`) | | **The Things Stack Sandbox** | a LoRaWAN network server; its command line simulates a device's uplinks | free, for non-commercial testing | not built; the bridge's ChirpStack profile is the LoRaWAN path today | | **CWOP, through APRS-IS and findU** | live reports of thousands of home weather stations, many of them Davis and Ambient | free | not built | | **ThingSpeak public channels** | anyone's published channels, some with soil probes | no key for a public channel | not built: quality varies, and the soil channel found had stopped in 2019 | **Makers whose APIs need their own device or account**, with no public demonstration found: Ecowitt, Davis WeatherLink, Tempest, METER ZENTRA Cloud, Onset HOBOlink. Their stations' **local** protocols are read already (`sdk/station_adapters.py`: Tempest's UDP broadcast, the WeatherLink Live's HTTP API, an Ecowitt gateway's custom upload), and those are tested against the makers' published examples. ## What the first runs showed * **openSenseMap's LSE01 station labels its conductivity in ohms**, which a conductivity is not. The reader leaves it out and says why, rather than guess a unit. * **That LSE01 reads 2.1 to 2.4% soil water**: very dry sand, or a probe out of the soil. It passes the health checks, being in range and moving. The soil advisory now tells a probe out of the soil by a reading drier than the bed's soil can be (built 2026-10-14, [modules/soilwater](../../modules/soilwater/README.md#a-probe-out-of-the-soil)): in a loam this one would be out of the soil, and in sand it cannot say. Its keeper has not said which soil it is in. * **The SMT50's 34 readings** in six hours, thinned to one each ten minutes, all passed. * **OpenSprinkler's firmware published** a station opening and closing with its duration, a rain delay set and cleared, and a program starting with its water level and its weather, sensor and total scales. The bridge parsed every one. It had not mapped the weather scale (`wa`), which its own description promised; it does now. The firmware's `availability` message is a plain word, `online`, not JSON. Changing the water level by hand and asking for a reboot published nothing in the demo build, so those topics are still unchecked. ## Running OpenSprinkler's demo firmware git clone https://github.com/OpenSprinkler/OpenSprinkler-Firmware fw cd fw && git submodule update --init --recursive docker build --build-arg BUILD_VERSION=DEMO -t opensprinkler-demo . Its own Dockerfile adds the Raspberry Pi package repository even for the demo; a smaller image is Debian with `g++ make libmosquittopp-dev libssl-dev`, `make VERSION=DEMO`, and the binary run as `OpenSprinkler -d /data`. The demo build serves HTTP on port 80, not the 8080 its README gives for the Raspberry Pi build. The default password is `opendoor`, sent as its MD5. MQTT is set with `/co?pw=…&mqtt={"en":1,"host":…,"port":1883,"pubt":"opensprinkler",…}`, and nothing is published until the notification options `ife` and `ife2` enable it.