Intro

iGrow is a plant-monitoring system built around cheap sensors and a small amount of infrastructure. I have a few tropical plants I want to keep alive. After finding that ESP32 boards and capacitive moisture sensors can be had for less than a dollar each, I put together a prototype and started collecting data.

This project is intended to be more than a screenshot. When the live integration is connected, this page will display real telemetry from a plant in my home.

Prototype

The hardware side is intentionally simple: Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensor v1.2 units and ESP32 development boards. A sensor posts moisture readings to a basic API over Wi-Fi.

The web interface displays moisture level against a few calibration variables:

• Minimum moisture % — baseline for bone dry
• Maximum moisture % — baseline for fully submerged
• Water Detection % — threshold that indicates the plant was just watered

I'm monitoring a plant for a couple of weeks under normal care to see how the data behaves. I expect to open-source the code and design if it proves useful.

Technical overview

Even as a personal project, iGrow is meant to exercise the full loop of an operational system:

• sensor integration
• telemetry ingestion
• backend services
• data storage
• dashboards
• alerts
• deployment
• ongoing operation

Project future

I'd like the website and API to be general enough to support a broader product ecosystem — humidity detection, cameras for timelapses, irrigation, and room/zone organization for groups of plants. Enclosures for the ESP32 and moisture sensor are also on the list.