So I keep coming back to this project because it's still a dream of mine to have a business (I'd settle for side hustle) of selling hydroponic produce, but not having a background in development among other distractions had been getting me down. Also I realize I don't need any of this fancy sensor jazz, but c'mon, gotta have it. Nonetheless, I've slowly been chipping away at it and with this update I'm happy to post that I've made some decent progress!

I've probably scrapped my code 4 or 5 times along the way, there were many times where I struggled to grasp fundamental concepts of AVR programming and had to take some steps back to see how I was really trying to accomplish my goal of using this hardware. This while also juggling JavaScript / Node / MongoDB for the first time as a Windows sysadmin was kind of driving me mad, but it's paying off I think? I dunno, I ain't quitting my day job just yet, and I can't go intern as a junior dev cause I got bills to pay.

Anyways I'm digressing quite a bit here, check out what I've got if you're interested.

This project is really only two parts so far, the AVR sensor side and the NodeJS backend hooking up to Thingspeak.

The board I'm developing on is the TeensyLC because it's crazy affordable for having 3 serial ports, each one dedicated to its own sensor (pH, ORP, and EC). And from the Teensy it's transmitting data from each sensor over Serial so that it can be read on /dev/ttyACM0 on my Node server using SerialPort. And from there it's pretty simple, it'll parse each line as they're received and assign the data to an appropriate variable which is then uploaded and graphed on Thingspeak.

I'll post some more updates with photo, details on the program, and plans for the future. This was more of a 'oh shit it's actually working like 2 years later' update and I'm pretty excited!