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Soil moisture monitoring and control are essential aspects for precision agriculture. The paper presents the designing and calibration of a low-cost soil moisture monitoring system. The system includes 28 capacitive sensors, connected to an Arduino based data acquisition system, allowing simultaneous multi-point measurements. The calibration process was conducted on six reference points within the moisture content range of 0-25%. The calibration results indicate a non-linear variation and reveal a significant deviation between the sensors leading to the determination of individual variation curves for each sensor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vehicle market at the European level (and also elsewhere) has registered a high dynamic for the adoption of electric vehicles as the future means of transport. Government policies and decisions fully support this move, but there are still massive barriers to entry into the EV market due to consumer attitudes and perceptions. Consumer attitudes and perceptions will be decisive in the market success of future electric vehicle models, given that consumers are particularly interested in the vehicles' technical and dynamic performance. The pressure from customers' demands for performance leaves its mark not only on the increase of performance and technical parameters, but directly contributes to the generation of interdependence between these parameters. This article presents a comparative statistical analysis of 203 electric vehicle models (from various construction categories), present in the European vehicle market (between the years 2019 and 2022), to highlight the direct and indirect links (interdependencies) between technical and performance parameters depending on the constructive class (type). The goal of this article is to determine whether there is a relationship between the three key performance metrics for electric vehicles—autonomy, top speed, and acceleration—and five significant technical/constructive metrics for these vehicles—battery capacity, energy efficiency, electric motor power, fast charging speed, and vehicle weight (brand and year of availability in the market). Based on the analyzed data, it can be stated that the design and construction of an electric vehicle model currently takes into account both performance and technical parameters, with a strong link between the weight of the vehicle and the energy capacity of the battery (+0.687) being highlighted and also the relationship between autonomy and vehicle weight (+0.355). The conclusions of this study can be used in the future by manufacturers for the development of new models of electric vehicles (new generic platforms and chassis) by classifying/standardizing these vehicles into specific classes, corresponding to the requirements of different classes of consumers or identifying constructive solutions specific to each type of consumer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]