A cloud-native IoT platform to remotely monitor and control a grow tent, with AI plant-health vision
Run an entire grow room from your phone: sensors, lights, camera, and an AI agronomist.
A custom-branded platform that lets multiple growers remotely monitor and control one grow site (sensors, lights, fans, smart plugs, and a live camera) with hourly AI vision scans for plant health. A stateless on-site edge appliance handles the hardware while the brains stay in the cloud.
A look at the interface.
Representative UI — abstracted, never a client's real data.- FastAPI
- TimescaleDB
- MQTT
- SwiftUI
- Claude Vision
- balenaOS
- AWS
The hardware controller has no usable cloud API and the camera lost remote P2P, so a no-on-site-device path was impossible. The solution was a minimal immutable edge appliance bridging Bluetooth and the camera's LAN, with a real automation goal: a rules engine where sensors, VPD, schedules, and AI insights drive actions with safety guards.
How it
works
The hardware has no cloud API and the camera lost remote P2P, so a minimal immutable edge appliance on the camera's LAN bridges video while everything else lives in the cloud. FastAPI + TimescaleDB ingests MQTT telemetry and exposes a command path and live WebSocket feed. An hourly cheap-model vision scan auto-escalates to a frontier model only when something looks off.
What I built
(03) Inside the buildAsync telemetry + control backend
FastAPI with TimescaleDB hypertables ingests MQTT telemetry, auto-registers devices, and exposes a command path plus a WebSocket live feed, with role-based JWT auth.
Tiered AI plant-health vision
An hourly cheap-model scan auto-escalates to a frontier model at full resolution only when something looks off, budgeted at a few dollars per site per month.
Immutable edge appliance
A balenaOS box on the camera's LAN bridges video, and the backend reverse-proxies its stream behind short-lived tokens so growers get live video without any network setup.
The
receipts
- Backend live on free-tier cloud over public HTTPS, all endpoints verified
- Live 1080p camera relay through a token-gated proxy
- Two-tier AI vision budgeted at ~$3–5/mo per site
- Daily encrypted backups and 5-minute health alerting