Garden Habitat Data Pipeline (Sensors, Java, Docker, Python)

My project is about building a prototype for a garden habitat monitoring system with sensors and creating a data pipeline with the ability to use visualization tools and programs to generate statistics to learn more about my seedling environment.

This is my first time gardening and planting vegetables, particularly from seedlings. Since the Arduino can interface with various sensors I thought it would be great to capture information on the moisture of the soil, the temperature, and also humidity. I also thought it would be great to use some of the other applications I tend to work with on a daily basis as a software engineer such as Docker, Java micro services, Python, etc... to create a data pipeline from my sensors back to a relational database.

I've seen many tutorial videos that explain the sensor basics with Arduino but there never seemed to be a deep enough discussion on what to do with this data once you collect it. Most tutorials acted on the data immediately to trigger a water pump to water soil. I would like to potentially not only use these sensors to automate watering my soil but I'd also like to take a deeper dive into the data to really understand what my vegetables are experiencing from as many environmental factors as possible.

The garden habitat monitoring prototype works in the following manner:

1) The moisture, humidity, and temperature sensors provide readings to the Arduino WiFi board.

2) The Arduino WiFi board then creates HTTP POST requests with a JSON payload and sends this off to a Java microservice API running in a Docker container.

3) The API then publishes this data to a MySQL database, running in a Docker container, to be stored for later use.

4) I then use Jupyter Notebooks, Pandas, and Matplotlib to generate statistics and graphs from this data in the MySQL database.

This process completes a data pipeline from my seedling environment to a relational database.

I created a YouTube channel named Embedded Garden. I plan to post more videos as I build my garden and add automation for watering and sensor data collection. I am hoping to engineer a solar powered solution when my final garden monitoring system is completely implemented.

Here is a link to the YouTube channel. I created three videos as a 3 part series titled Seedlings and Sensors.

This is only my second Arduino project. My first project your blog featured on the site. I made my old AT-AT walker from Star Wars remote controlled and walk. Here is a link to that blog article also: https://blog.arduino.cc/2015/12/10/making-a-vintage-star-wars-at-at-toy-walk-with-an-arduino/