PlantBud

A set of distributed sensors that can gather metrics about your plants.

Architecture

Technologies

• ESP32: Measure plant metrics and use HTTP requests to relay these to a DB
• Micropython as the runtime on the ESP32
• Raspberry Pi: Host NodeRED to act as an interface between local network and internet
• Ansible to manage the RPi
• NodeRED: Run on Pi in local network to wire together the ESP32 sensors with APIs and DBs
• HomeAssistant: Run on Pi in local network to orchestrate and display information about IoT devices in the home
• InfluxDB: Time-series database to aggregate and serve the plant metrics
• OracleCloud: Provide a free-tier VM for container deployments
• Docker/Docker-Compose: Run container based software

Get Started

Prepare a Raspberry Pi for use with ansible

1. Get the ip of the raspi on your network
2. SSH in with the standard user pi and pw raspberry
3. Create a new user sudo useradd $NEWUSER
4. Add that new user to the sudo group `sudo usermod -aG sudo $NEWUSER``
5. Allow the user to execute sudo commands without password:
   1. sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/$NEWUSER_nopasswd
   2. change all to NOPASSWD
6. Logout, log in as new user check that it works (no password prompt): sudo ls
7. Create a new ssh-key to login to the pi: ssh-keygen -t rsa
8. Copy the key to the pi: ssh-copy-id $KEY [email protected]
9. SSH to the pi with key to see that it works: ssh -i $KEY [email protected]
10. Similarly ansible should now be usable with this key to execute commands on the pi