Thank you everyone who attended my session at both DevConf Cape Town and Pretoria
I met so many amazing people excited about creating a more sustainable future.
This is a quick blog post which includes the presented slide deck. I hope attendees found the talk useful. It’s a very broad topic and fitting months of content into 40 min is a little challengening. So the presentation is a broad overview of the completed farming project project and there’s links to more deeper content within the slides. This includes content and github repositiories with some source code examples. The plan is to also release ALL the content eventually as a full OSS project when I’m happy with it, including the Mobile App and integrations with the cloud components. I’m currently rounding everything off to do this. So expect a few more posts about this and source code.
The slides can be found below
DevConf YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/-74owkJbfEQ?list=PLZgTMWtBnKkopU5DZbP7so-f3z7eMFYqq
There is also Agri hacks planned where we can hack and learn about this topic together over a few sessions where you can learn hands on how to build something like this project. This will be a free to attend event held at @CPTMSDUG in Cape Town. Keep an eye out here: https://www.meetup.com/cape-town-ms-dev-user-group/events/
This hack series be similar in format to our current IoT AI hack series currently running. You can see some of the fun had here at the all day iot hack events: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23iotaihackdays&src=typed_query&f=image
Additional Information
I received so many questions on how to get started. I suggest getting the off the shelf kit I mentioned in the talk that I started with. It contains everything you need to grow your first plants. This is also an indoor grower, so you can start with growing from seeds indoor and not worry about weather and protecting the electronics against sun and water. It will also make your home office a lot prettier. 😊
What’s in the kit
Arduino
4 x Solenoids (for 4 plants)
4 x Relays
4 Moisture Sensors
1 Pump
Silicon Piping
The kit is great to learn with as it’s not a “black box” watering system. It’s an arduino where Elecrow provides the source code to flash onto the arduino. It works out of the box, but it also allows you to learn from it and also make changes.
Please don’t start by hacking it like I did. I decided it should to be connected to Azure IoT. That’s definitely not needed especially when starting out. But the instructions are there if you want to do that too. 😊
For the beginner this is great and as you could see in the talk, once plants start multiplying, you are forced to scale from there. 😁
Link to github repository:
https://github.com/apead/SmartWateringKit
Link to blog post on the kit:
Where to buy the kit in South Africa:
https://www.robotics.org.za/AAK90039K?search=smart%20watering%20kit
Once again thanks to everyone that attended both my session and DevConf 2023 and made the conference the amazing conference it was!
