seedling — IoT plant-care companion

A Czech high-school startup-program project (Soutěž & Podnikej) that became an obsession with the connected-home of the biological world.

What shipped

• Sensor nodes — soil moisture, air temperature, humidity and luminosity
• ESP32 firmware — MQTT-over-WiFi with OTA updates and low-power sleep
• Companion app — write-ups of the actual sensor reading vs. target curve, pushing a gentle reminder instead of a nag
• Enclosures — 3D printed and sanded to look less like an electronics project, more like a nice pebble

What I learned

• Sensors lie. Every calibration conversation pays off later.
• Battery life is a product feature; the OTA pipeline is where the entire project lives or dies.
• The pipeline fidelity: data ingestion, dead-band filtering, and alerting logic matters as much as the pretty dashboard. This project prefigures my later “health check” dashboards for servers.