Sunday, November 5, 2017

A smart watering system built on IBM Bluemix

In the last months, I spent some time building a prototype of a smart watering system. I had the idea while building a watering system for my plants, because the current technology has few drawbacks, like:
  • inability to remotely monitor the status of the plants;
  • inability to remotely configure the watering cycles (possibly basing the configuration on the current weather and the forecasts);
  • impossibility to remotely check if the system is delivering too much water (leakage) or too few (bottleneck).
These kind of problems can be quickly solved through an internet connected watering device. I just decided to build a prototype using some commercial components, an control board I developed, and a software stack built on the IBM Bluemix platform.