A backyard garden with sensors in the dirt.

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 sits in the bed and is read every second at 12-bit resolution (0.0625 °C steps). 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.