Have a green thumb and looking for a new way to help your plant babies flourish? This project by zenofall on hackster.io might work!
Well I don’t have a farm, I live in an apartment in an urban area and have a small garden, but the above idea was my inspiration behind creating an Internet of things (IoT) community garden which could be managed remotely by a group of like-minded people using Telegram app group chat. For those unfamiliar with Telegram, it is a messaging application similar to Whatsapp, but it allows any user to create a bot using an API, a bot is simply some code which responds to commands in an automated fashion. So I implemented my idea by coding up a Telegram Bot which runs on a Rasberry Pi and accepts commands from users – to water plants, take a picture, turn lights on and off. I plan to further expand this in the future by adding temperature and moisture sensors, but for now I simply pull the weather data using weather API for dark sky. On April 4th 2019 I posted about the bot on Facebook groups and soon had random people from around the world join my Telegram group to play with my bot. Currently as I write this article I have about 30-35 people who interact with the bot daily.
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