The whole project is based on the Arduino platform, so of course you will need an Arduino board. I will use an Arduino Uno board for this project. Then, you need a board with the CC3000 chip. What I recommend is using the Adafruit CC3000 breakout board, which is the only one I tested that worked without problem.

To measure the temperature & humidity in the soil, you will need an appropriate sensor. For this guide, I used the Soil Temperature/Moisture sensor from Adafruit, which is based on the SHT10 sensor from Sensirion. It's quite easy to use with Arduino as there is a dedicated library, so it will be easy to interface with our project.

Finally, you need a breadboard and some jumper wires to make the connections between the different parts.

First, you need to connect the CC3000 chip to the Arduino Uno board. To get a step-by-step guide on how to connect and use the CC3000 breakout board, I recommend to visit this detailed guide.

Basically, you need to connect the IRQ pin of the CC3000 board to pin number 3 of the Arduino board, VBAT to pin 5, and CS to pin 10. Then, you need to connect the SPI pins to the Arduino board: MOSI, MISO, and CLK go to pins 11,12, and 13, respectively. Finally, take care of the power supply: Vin goes to the Arduino 5V, and GND to GND.

Connecting the soil sensor is relatively easy. It comes with wires not connected to any pins, so I simply soldered a 4-pins header to the 4 wires of the sensor. Simply connect the GND pin to the GND of the Arduino, VCC to 5V, Clock to Arduino pin 7, and Data to Arduino pin 6. The following picture explains the roles of the different wires coming from the sensor:

The following picture summarises all the required connections for the hardware part of this project:

When the project is fully assembled, this is how it should look like: