Plant Monitor

18 Feb 2020 - Jake Sherwood

Plant monitor

D2D - Plant monitor

For device to database we were tasked with setting up a plant monitor to send data on our plant over MQTT to a broker.

Learning MQTT has been really fun and I like the ease of the protocol.

Using the MKRzero 1010 with the enviro-shield the circuit was very simple. Just an added led and capacitive soil monitor.

For code I started with the sample TemperatureHumidityLED sketch. I added additional mqtt publish cmds for pressure, illuminance, uva, uvb, moisture.

In testing I also noticed on the MQTT explorer app that someone had added a topic for configInterval. I thought that was a good idea and would allow me to poke my monitor to see that it was still alive. So I worked that into my code.

The deployed device has crashed on me several times. I’ve done a few rounds of Wifi firmware upgrades and it is still unfortunately crashing. Not really sure what the issue is.

I’ve also been obsessing a little over watching the MQTT explorer dashboard. And tried to troll some classmates by turning their LEDs on and off. Also spent a while looking for a decent iOS MQTT monitor and unfortunately failed. Guess I should build one.

Plant monitor