Growing Chillies with Home Automation

I may have reached peak nerd this weekend. Whilst at the garden centre with my family, I decided to buy some chilli plant seeds. Having bought the seeds, and potted them with my kids, I put them in the electric propagator I had lying around in the garage - this is just an enclosed box with a low power heating element at the bottom.

I walked away, and wondered what temperature the propagator would be driving towards. Would it be the desired 23 degrees? What if it was too hot or too cold? And how humid was it? What if it ran out of water? I couldn’t face not knowing so set to work extending my Kubernetes-based home automation solution.

I wanted to be able to do the following:

Handily I had the following lying around from previous projects:

I also had Home Assistant, a Mosquito MQTT Broker, and Prometheus monitoring system.

Long story short, the temperature sensor is connected to the NodeMCU board running a Micropython script, polling for readings and pushing out MQTT messages over WiFi.

The switch also connects to the MQTT broker over wifi so it can be controlled by Home Assistant.

A quick reload and the data and switch control are available through the web interface.

And here’s the data in Prometheus.

I haven’t had time to add the automations and alerts, but at least now I can keep an eye on it 😌

Um… there kind of wasn’t one. I wanted to hack this together, and managed to get it working in an hour or so, so got a bit over excited.

I’d love to chat if you’ve done anything similar 🤓

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