MQTT Based Monitoring System for Urban Farmers Using ESP32 and Raspberry Pi

With rapidly developing technology and the Internet of Things taking the world by storm, easy-to-use and low-cost solutions are being provided to almost any and every application in the world. In a similar way, technological solutions are also now being applied to urban farming, a practice which has gained momentum especially in large cities, to help citizens grow vegetables and the like in their own homes or establishments. Urban farming is now more important than ever in the context of the rapid urbanization and development of smart cities all over the world. It is important that residents in urban areas grow their vegetables, and it is important that they do it the right way. Only then will it be possible, in the future, to sustain ourselves in large cities and places which are not quite accessible by villages where farming is done on a large scale. In this paper, we propose a process of growing and taking care of the plants, so that maximum efficiency is guaranteed in the growth process and also information is generated and shared by the whole community. This information will help us crunch the data and arrive at better decisions. The solution works on sensors monitoring the temperature, humidity, ambient light intensity and soil moisture levels pertaining to a certain plant. These sensors are connected to a device which makes understandable data out of these sensor outputs. This then communicates with a central device which collects information from all such sensors, and displays this on a locally hosted webpage. The content is also shown on a dashboard for comfortable visualization and understanding. It also stores a database which can be referred for future analytics. All the devices used are low-cost and consume low-power, which is ideally suited for IoT applications which focus more on communicating effectively at low costs.