This presentation outlines the design of a smart garden system. The system consists of a cloud component where data is streamed to and commands are relayed from the local sites. The other component is the locally positioned SBC-powered system that orchestrates a group of sensors and controllers while maintaining a tunnel to the cloud.
The choice of protocol for local communication between the SBC-based coordinator, sensors and controllers is open. The current set up is based around Zigbee due to the small size of the deployment site and the unobstructed nature of the terrain on which the system was developed. Possible alternatives include Lora WAN, Wi-Fi and Z-wave.
The system leverages the power of the open-source graph visualization and monitoring platform Grafana and the time-series database Prometheus. Grafana is the obvious choice for a user dashboard that can display real-time site statistics like soil-moisture, ph score and EC. Its widgets can also be embedded in a custom-made user application. Grafana also provides system monitoring capabilities that will be used by the system operators to ensure proper functioning.
The cloud component provides long-term storage of all locally-streamed data. It also allows the owner to export all collected data for analysis by a third-party expert. The long-term development goal here is development of a machine learning pipeline that will provide automatic insights to site owners based on their collected data.
Java comes in as a natural choice for integrating with the Grafana/Prometheus cloud component. Using the now well established functional patterns present in modern Java, we can write exporters that stream our custom data source to the cloud.