Custom IoT soil sensors, 4K visual tracking, and real-time telemetry—engineering high-elevation organic growing in Nevada’s Carson Valley.
The stream loads only when you click. It's high-resolution (about 16 Mbps), so Wi-Fi is better than mobile data.
Readings from our own sensor at the pile, every minute. Pick a time range; hover or tap a chart to read every value at that moment.
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A whole day in under a minute: one frame every 30 seconds from sunrise to sunset, built each night from the camera's recordings, with the garden sensors' readings at each moment. Drag the slider or step through it frame by frame.
The one custom-built sensor behind "In the garden": what it measures, how it's wired, and how its readings reach this page every minute.
What's being built, tested or measured in the garden right now.
Builds, experiments and timelapses from the beds.
How the sensors, camera and hub in this garden work.
A Raspberry Pi 5 runs Home Assistant and a Mosquitto MQTT broker as the garden hub. A DFRobot FireBeetle 2 ESP32-C5 in the beds reads a DS18B20 soil temperature probe and an SHT31 air temperature and humidity sensor (DFRobot SEN0385) and uploads a one-minute average over Wi-Fi. A Luxonis OAK-1-W-PoE camera streams the beds live in 4K H.265 from a second Raspberry Pi 5.
The Luxonis OAK-1-W-PoE encodes 4K at 30 fps in H.265 on the camera itself, so the Raspberry Pi only stores 10-minute clips and repackages the stream as HLS. A Cloudflare Tunnel exposes just the live stream, and Cloudflare's edge caches each 2-second segment, so the home connection sends it once per location instead of once per viewer.
A waterproof DS18B20 1-Wire digital probe, currently buried in a compost pile (¼ compost, ¾ clay) to track composting heat, is read every second at 12-bit resolution (0.0625 °C steps). An SHT31 sensor next to it measures air temperature and relative humidity. The ESP32-C5 averages the minute's good readings and skips any that fail, so bad values never reach the chart.
Area forecasts come from Open-Meteo, including soil moisture estimates and evapotranspiration used for the frost warning and watering tip. On-site readings come from the garden's own sensors and are shown separately under 'In the garden'.
Yes. The parts are off-the-shelf: an ESP32 board, a DS18B20 probe, an SHT31 sensor, a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant, and optionally a PoE camera. The current projects section lists what is running, what is being rebuilt and what comes next, and the YouTube channel @pjcwalina covers the builds.
Questions about a project, a sensor setup, or something you saw on the camera? Send a note; it comes straight to me.