Wanting to explore the technology like ESP microcontrollers and automating plant growing, my dear friend, Farah Amri, and me got asked to transform an old storage room in on our campus' Fablab into a space for plants. We quickly decided on the actual concept for the room, a plant nursery.

At the time, a lot of plants in the Fablab were very much in bad shape, since now came in during the summer vacation and because in the months running up to this project, no one was staffed the Fablab. Hence, Farah and me set out to nurse the plants back to their former glory!

While Farah started designing for the space, I looked into the technology side of things. I quickly decided to use a ESP32 as microcontroller of choice, as I had some C++ code for it lying around from a previous project. After some thinking, I would drop that idea, and opt for a more accessible way of programming ESPs for an automated network. Instead of writing all that code myself, we would use Home Assistant with ESPHome to managed the entire project.

The campus' IoT lab already had an instance of Home Asisstant running, so we hooked up ESPHome and started prototyping right away. Getting to grips with ESPHome proved to be hard for me, resulting in many moments where I wished I'd written this in C++ instead.

After a month or two, we had our first prototype of the first type of zone, one to nurse big plants back to health. Each zone could house up to 4 plants. Each with a OLED screen and LED stick to show critical information at a glance, a water pump, soil moisture sensor and ambient sensor, along with a big plant light per set of plants, controlled by a relay.

Drawings shown were made by Farah Amri.