Automated Garden

This project is a monorepo containing code for an ESP32-based microcontroller project and a Go backend for improving interactions with multiple irrigation systems.

If you have any question at all, please reach out and I would love to chat about the project!

This system is designed to be flexible for all types of gardening. Here are a few examples of different possible setups:

• Traditional irrigation system using 24V AC valves
• Backyard vegetable garden
• Indoor garden with a pump and multiple valves to control watering plants, plus a grow light
• Indoor seedling germination system with a pump and grow light (fan and heating pad control possibly coming soon)
• Hydroponics system with one circulation or aeration pump

How It Works

Garden Server

This Go application is contained in the garden-app directory and consists of a CLI and web backend for interacting with the garden controller. It implements all logic and orchestrates the separate systems.

Key features include:

• Intuitive REST API
• Actions to water plants and toggle a light
• Water plants automatically on a schedule
• Aggregate data from connected services and previous actions
• Scale watering based on external weather API

Garden Controller

This Arduino-compatible firmware is contained in the garden-controller and is intended to be used with an ESP32. It implements the most basic functionality to control hardware based on messages from the Go application received over MQTT.

Key features include:

• Control valves or devices (only limited by number of output pins)
• Queue up water events to water multiple zones one after the other
• Publish data and logs to InfluxDB via Telegraf + MQTT
• Respond to buttons to water individual zones and cancel watering

Core Technologies

• Arduino/FreeRTOS
• Go
• MQTT
• InfluxDB
• Telegraf
• Netatmo Weather (optional for weather-based watering)
• Grafana (optional for visualization of data)
• Prometheus (optional for metrics)
• Loki + Promtail (optional for log aggregation)

Quickstart/Demo

Use Docker Compose to easily run everything and try it out! This will run all services the garden-app depends on, plus an instance of the garden-app and a mock garden-controller.

1. Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/calvinmclean/automated-garden.git
cd automated-garden

2. Run Docker Compose and wait a bit for everything to start up

docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yml --profile demo up

3. Try out some curl commands to see what is available in the API

# list all Gardens
curl -s localhost:8080/gardens | jq

# get a specific Garden
curl -s localhost:8080/gardens/c9i98glvqc7km2vasfig | jq

# get all Zones that are a part of this Garden
curl -s localhost:8080/gardens/c9i98glvqc7km2vasfig/zones | jq

• You may notice that these responses all contain a links array with the full API routes for other endpoints related to the resources. Go ahead and follow some of these links to learn more about the available API!

4. Water a Zone for 3 seconds

curl -s localhost:8080/gardens/c9i98glvqc7km2vasfig/zones/c9i99otvqc7kmt8hjio0/action \
  -d '{"water": {"duration": 3000}}'

5. Now access Grafana dashboards at http://localhost:3000 and login as admin/adminadmin

• The "Garden App" dashboard contains application metrics for resource usage, HTTP stats, and others
• The "Garden Dashboard" dashboard contains more interesting data that comes from the garden-controller to show uptime and a watering history. You should see the recent 3 second watering event here

6. Access the UI at http://localhost:8080/gardens

And that's it! I encourage you to check out the additional documentation for more detailed API usage and to learn about all of the things that are possible.

Frontend

This project includes an HTMX UI served by the Go application.

Compile controller

pio run -t upload