i ended up building a small grow monitoring + watering setup with a raspberry pi and thought it might fit here.
the pi is reading data from xiaomi hhcc flora sensors over bluetooth (temperature, humidity and soil moisture) and based on that it controls a small automatic watering system. everything runs fully local, no cloud, no accounts, no api keys or passwords needed.
my first approach was pretty messy, i tried to glue everything together with cron jobs and some scripts + rsync, which kinda worked but was super unreliable and annoying to maintain. so i rewrote it into a proper service that just runs continuously and reacts to changes in real time.
setup is fairly simple now, the install script takes care of dependencies and config and then everything just runs in the background on the pi. if something breaks i can just ssh in and fix it.
right now it handles monitoring and watering, but i am experimenting with adding some kind of prediction so it can decide when plants actually need water instead of just using fixed intervals.
has been surprisingly stable so far for something running on a small pi in the corner 😄
still work in progress, but already saved me a few times when i was not home for a couple of days.
if anyone is curious or has ideas:
