Meet ‘Remote Water Feeder’ for my dear plants
Built using RaspberryPi Zero, Appsmith, Supabase & MQTT protocol.
Recently my wife and I were in a dilemma — how were we going to water our plants since we were to be on a month-long vacation.
A few friends suggested that we drop the plants at their place, but the engineer inside us said, “Meh! Where is the challenge in that?!” Hence, the idea to water plants remotely was born. Some great open source tools came to aid to plan this seamlessly. Here’s how.
Hardware we used:
- RPI Zero for the controller
- 12v DC brushed motor as a water pump
- 5v Electromagnetic relay to control power supply
It uses a protocol called MQTT, that would trigger a python function on the RPI. This gives us an endpoint which can be called from a the web app
We used Appsmith (OSS) to create a web app for us to trigger the above explained flow from a remote location. It was quick to build a dashboard and plus it looked beautiful out of the box 💯, and just hitting the deploy button, my app was live. Appsmith also allowed to connect to my datasource easily and fetch the executions details of the function run and display on the dashboard; This is how is looked finally👇
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We used Supabase (OSS) postgres instance as our datasource, They provide a 500MB DB instance for free, enough for my personal use. We stored all our feeding schedule here which also helped us generate some beautiful insights
Very relieved and satisfied with the project. Friends and family showed a lot of interest on the system, wanted it for themselves, An affirmation that the system is useful .