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FinnLobsien 12 hours ago [-]
I understand some of the comments here around "optimizing the fun out of the game". I'd also prefer to acquire an intuitive sense of plant health, vegetable seasons, etc.
But I also get the appeal of systemizing things and think for the type of person who loves automating and building systems, I was astounded about the low cost. I would've imagined this kind of setup to cost thousands of euros.
I'm curious about the future of systems like these. We recently saw internet-connected supermarket freezers hacked, so I wonder if internet-connected IoT stuff will be as commonplace in the future.
Kiln6125 4 hours ago [-]
I would imagine IoT to be even better, but hopefully less cloud-connected. I can see plenty of use cases in my own life where if I could put a microcontroller somewhere I could help iron out some unnecessary friction/do something fun and cool, but would never hand over that functionality to some faceless corporation to do whatever they want with my lightbulb data or what have you. It seems to me there's no point to that at all if you're just using some gadget you have.
ryankrage77 16 hours ago [-]
I'm reminded of that adage "Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game". A fully automated setup is cool, but if it's working well, there's not much to do. You're not gardening any more.
I have a bunch of plants on my window sill, and considered getting moisture sensors and automating watering, but I realised that kind of defeats the point of looking after the plants myself. On top of the satisfaction of manual work, I recently realised that it's taught me an intuition - the quirks of how much water each plant wants at different times of year (even cacti are thirsty in summer!), and how soil composition and pot size affects water retention. It's probably not generally transferable knowledge, but it was fun to realise I'd come to know my plants really well.
asr 16 hours ago [-]
Th author spent however long on setup and wrote up a blog post. They are doing something different than you, but it’s clear they are also having fun. There is room for two approaches, and I’m not going to tell anyone else their approach “defeats the point,” because we really don’t even have to agree on the point! Glad you enjoy your approach.
fxtentacle 13 hours ago [-]
Or the author is doing this for SEO. He’s the founder of the AI platform all of this is running on. Or maybe he enjoys the technical tinkering more than the gardening ;)
gopalv 52 minutes ago [-]
> maybe he enjoys the technical tinkering more than the gardening
Por que no los dos?
For me, gardening switches between being an old testament god with a spray bottle and a general process god who sets everything in motion, then takes eternity off.
Both are fun, but different kinds of fun.
mihaaly 13 hours ago [-]
I assume a comment here is very frequently an opinion not a normative statement. One way of consideration from among the many. His opinion, that this way defeats the point, is very well in line to say this way, we shouldn't even hint to shut up about it. It does not and cannot hinder anyone having alternative approach to the matter, it was not even implied here, as far as I can see, the room for alternative is there.
vidarh 13 hours ago [-]
I don't like gardening, so that sounds like a win to me. I can kill any plant. I don't enjoy that. I enjoy having nice plants around me.
pvaldes 11 hours ago [-]
> I don't like gardening
heressy!
> I can kill any plant
Hum, suddenly you have exactly the most skill wanted in gardening. People will pay for your magic touch on all those stinking needles and weeds out of control.
If it works also with moles, people will make queues at your door with marry me proposals.
vidarh 9 hours ago [-]
> heressy!
Maybe I'd feel differently if I didn't have a growing history of plant murder behind me.
> Hum, suddenly you have exactly the most skill wanted in gardening.
Unfortunately, I believe a necessary pre-condition for my skill to work is that you need to have a genuine desire for the plant to survive first.
It seems near certain it will die shortly afterward.
pvaldes 9 hours ago [-]
Every gardener is a cereal murderer; almost as the same level than bakers. One of the best secrets of gardening is that most plants are clones, so is like exploring a video-game with infinite lives. After killing exactly the same plant five times, it starts improving.
vidarh 7 hours ago [-]
The problem is that I most certainly does not have the patience for that. I'd rather have automation, or hired help, do it for me.
sirtaj 15 hours ago [-]
We have a gardener who comes to do our garden. I love my garden. I'm totally useless at gardening and while I like the idea of learning it, the opportunity cost against my other ADHD hobbies makes it impractical. So I just walk around and enjoy my garden.
gofreddygo 14 hours ago [-]
> You're not gardening any more.
You are though. Its the automation you garden now.
the curse of automation
ash_091 14 hours ago [-]
Some might call it the joy of automation.
Applejinx 11 hours ago [-]
You could get more of that out of Factorio…
ssl-3 3 hours ago [-]
Sure.
But we can eat the product of our automated Rube Goldberg gardening automation, while the only thing that Factorio produces in the real world is singing birds.
rob74 14 hours ago [-]
As someone with not much of a "green thumb", I would rather say this lets you keep the pleasant parts of gardening (planting, harvesting and generally enjoying your plants) while automating the chore of regularly watering them.
hackersnooze1 1 hours ago [-]
maybe he likes automating more than gardening
marky1991 10 hours ago [-]
There is always weeding. I would enjoy automated watering.
The fun part of gardening is planting something and watching them grow. I can do that without watering, watering brings me no joy and I still have lots of other things to do in the garden.
navane 14 hours ago [-]
I think he's farming now.
brunoarueira 13 hours ago [-]
I want to do a similar project, but on my father-in-law's house! There I'll have more trouble because the backyard is all covered with cement and the place I want to use is a little distant from the house, so I'm thinking in put some solar panel and battery, there is a roof at this part, to protect the battery and I'll use the roof as a mean to collect water through a gutter. If I put this project I'll write about and share here!
rob74 14 hours ago [-]
TIL what lakehouse means (a mix of "data lake" and "data warehouse" without the clarifying "data" part). Especially when mentioned in the same phrase as "garden", you tend to think of a physical house first...
froh 11 hours ago [-]
this comment made me think "oh this is about a data warehouse?" which it is not. it _is_ about a garden and automating watering and other chores.
world2vec 11 hours ago [-]
The massive data lakehouse at my dayjob was affectionately named "the swamp"
9 hours ago [-]
arjie 15 hours ago [-]
I have just the soil sensor and a smart power plug controlling a plug. Both in Home Assistant and guided by a job in my personal assistant LLM. Much more simplistic. Love your setup!
nubela 15 hours ago [-]
Too much AI writing; also, the author should have went with some hydroponics to scratch the tech itch.
superkickstart 14 hours ago [-]
They probably asked the whole plan from ai, what to buy and how to se it up. The blog text is obviously ai generated.
pimlottc 3 hours ago [-]
Or at least AI-translated. “Sensor pile” should clearly be “sensor stack”, for example.
swiftcoder 15 hours ago [-]
I do love a good goat-skinning project
ygouzerh 14 hours ago [-]
Great sharing! It's quite fun to read all the story behind the development.
pvaldes 14 hours ago [-]
Spend serious money in several garden sensors for an orchard.
Puts the orchard at the shadow.
Near a Parthenocissus
We all had been there. AI is not real I.
Friends don't let friends to be mocked forever by their partners about the smallest pumpkin violin in the world produced with a Lex-Lutor's level plan. If water is guaranteed by sensors, start by moving this raised bed to a sunny place, buddy. Or plant groceries able to climb.
And for Potato's sake, don't brag in front of your family about your smart stuff before to have obtained a decent result. It always ends the same.
The only good part is that this kale will have bigger leaves at the shadow, but bigger and tastier are inversely proportional in gardening.
anentropic 12 hours ago [-]
"Lakeshed"
yellow_lead 15 hours ago [-]
At least disclose using AI to write the post? The writing is grating to read.
darkwater 15 hours ago [-]
I wonder why Claude didn't suggest him to use Home Assistant from the very start. Pinning sensors in Google Earth sounds - sorry - ridiculous.
jondwillis 3 hours ago [-]
More tokens to burn! And we don't know what his prompts were, he could have steered it into bespoke solutions for everything. I mean, this is how balls of mud and bad architectures and new standards get invented even without AI in the mix.
vdanielpop 13 hours ago [-]
That's not lettuce, that's cabbage
waterfisher 15 hours ago [-]
why not write this yourself? wouldn't it be more fun? it'd certainly be more fun to read
ygouzerh 14 hours ago [-]
It's a pet project, not a newspaper. Not anyone have plenty of free time on their end.
nancyminusone 1 hours ago [-]
It is neither, it's an ad for author's ai platform. Author wants the most people to know about it by putting in the least effort.
jatorre 4 days ago [-]
Author here. This started as a 2 m² vegetable bed and got out of hand: 8 soil probes, a weather station, a camera, and a Rain Bird valve that I control through an old Android phone tapping its own app.
The part I found interesting: a fixed rules engine for watering kept being wrong in ways that needed context (forecast, last week's response, what the leaves look like). So an agent now runs every morning, reads the full history (4M readings, 62 MB in Iceberg), changes watering within hard limits, and logs what it expects to happen so it can check itself the next day.
Disclosure: the data side runs on LakehouseBox, which I'm building. The code is at github.com/jatorre/garden-lake. Happy to answer anything, including "why not Home Assistant."
This doesn't mean we're against using AI tools, coding agents, etc. We use them heavily ourselves! We just don't want generated or AI-edited text on HN itself. The community feels strongly about this.
lesostep 14 hours ago [-]
Would you be interested in adding a small patch nearby as a control group? Just to check how much improvement the rig makes?
Your cabbage looks very healthy and sturdy! Very neat!
But in my gardening experience cabbage is just like that. You sensor setup is at least tomato worthy.
nothercastle 4 hours ago [-]
Watering is an extremely hard problem to solve. Especially in an economic way
avh3 15 hours ago [-]
Very nice post! The github repo might still be private though. Getting a 404.
bakugo 10 hours ago [-]
Sad to see even the most obvious AI generated comments aren't being flagged anymore.
aaron695 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
krishanjarvis 4 days ago [-]
One practical lesson with agents that control physical things: give them a small set of named actions with hard limits, such as 'water zone 2 for at most 10 minutes', instead of raw device access. Models sometimes misread a sensor value or repeat an action because they forgot they already did it. A log of past actions that the agent reads before every decision, plus a cap on how often each action can run per day, turns most of those mistakes into harmless no-ops. A plant can survive one bad guess but not a stuck valve.
blitzar 15 hours ago [-]
Our robot overlords need to learn via reinforcement; if that means killing a few plants then better to overwater the plants than overwater humans.
ajayprashanth36 12 hours ago [-]
How do you handle stale sensor readings? I've seen agents act on hours-old data because nothing told them it was old.
Nashooo 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
zkmon 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Can you please not cross into personal attack? I'm sure you didn't mean your comment that way, but when you speak in the second person ("you") and get judgmental and even aggressive with your language, that's how it's going to come across whether you mean it to or not.
It's particularly bad when someone is just cheerfully sharing a fun project. Having a cement truck drive up and dump a load of denunciatory scolding is no one's idea of a fun thread. Please make your substantive points without any of this. It would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html as well.
It's clear that you have strong feelings on some (very) general issues, and you have good reasons for that. But picking on other people, especially for something as personal as how they choose to garden, is not an ok way to express yourself on this site.
hatthew 14 hours ago [-]
I agree with the sentiment that the human aspect of gardening can be fun, and personally I would not want to automate my own plant maintenance. But on the other hand, perhaps the author finds automation fun. Who are we to decide how they should do their own garden?
ygouzerh 14 hours ago [-]
Why not? OP seems to enjoy it. Everyone have the right to "tend their own garden" as they want.
Let people have some fun, it's not like he is pushing people to abandon manually taking care of a garden.
QuantumNomad_ 14 hours ago [-]
> Let other humans of your family also take part in it.
Not everyone wants to take care of other people’s plants. Maybe he already tried to involve his kids and it turned out they were just not interested.
zkmon 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ssl-3 13 hours ago [-]
I have a couple of questions.
When did this person's hobby become your property to cast your whims upon?
If you succeed at proving that they're incompetent, incapable, just holding it wrong, or whatever: Then what? How would this finding improve anyone's situation -- at all, anywhere?
zkmon 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
12 hours ago [-]
LeafItAlone 9 hours ago [-]
This is a super weird argument you are making. I’m not sure you’ve been part of a family or community with people of different likes or dislikes. Or maybe just want to argue about something do you choose this thread to go down. I suggest you abandon it.
My partner would say the plants in our household are mine, because I am responsible for them and they want no part in our responsibility of dealing with their care.
skrebbel 16 hours ago [-]
Zeurpiet
nehal3m 15 hours ago [-]
Jeez, this person is just combining their hobbies into something they apparently think is fun and you’re resting the whole world on their shoulders. Relax.
paganel 15 hours ago [-]
Because the OP is just dehumanising some basic, primary stuff, it's like telling someone to not sh*t in public because in so doing it also casts a bad light on us, people who happen to be watching him because we just happen to share the same sidewalk.
I don't want to be part of a world where people invaded by AI psychosis have turned a basic human thing like gardening into this AI-monstrosity.
nehal3m 15 hours ago [-]
Let’s say they just set up some sensors and automation based on regular algorithms or something like Home Assistant, would that pass muster to you? As in ‘hey look at this, I hacked some plants!’? This is just going one step further. You’re free to not like AI (I’m reluctant myself) but this seems to me like someone bashing some stuff together for fun. In my opinion you’re overreacting.
CrimsonRain 14 hours ago [-]
People like you will complain when AI makes it unnecessary to use pesticides in farming. bUT mUh hUmaNizED FArmiNG?
paganel 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hardbass 12 hours ago [-]
This guy paganel literally doesn't think mathematics is necessary in any science or tech. Really don't know what to say to that.
Just a hint, but maybe try reading the third paragraph of the actual post?
…and maybe stop yucking other people’s yums?
Mashimo 16 hours ago [-]
> Why not? Why do you keep your family members away from your fantastic project?
Kids these days want to play on their sega and listen to hip hop.
deanputney 14 hours ago [-]
But how else would he know the cat pissed in it?
zkmon 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hardbass 12 hours ago [-]
Whats wrong with sensors and data analysis? Sounds like a good small scale project to start with the subject. Do you think sensors and data are only used for "evil megatech"?
zkmon 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Please stop.
hardbass 10 hours ago [-]
What do you think sensors are used for? Answer with explicit examples.
kakacik 8 hours ago [-]
Come on, I am the last guy to defend AIs but the idea that there is only 1 proper way to do private things like gardening (your way of course) and others should be immediately attacked is... childish at best. You can certainly do better with less toxic words while your comment still says the same.
I for example detest gardening. Spent half of my childhood tending to various practical plants for eating in gardens, centrally planned communism I grew up in couldn't even reliably feed its people. But I love nature, forests, mountains, wilderness. I feel 0 reasons to create a mini plastic artificial version of it around my home, not when I have big wild forest at my doorstep, being at foothills of one mountain range and having heart of European alps in less than 1h drive (ie yesterday hopped to Chamonix in France to check few things and came back).
You gardening people look foolish to me - that massive amount of saved time (and money) means hiking, climbing, via ferratas or skiing / ski alpinism instead, alone or with kids - much better for bonding. While missing 0 of that nature contact. Yet its fine, you do you and I do me, no need punch down on anybody.
But I also get the appeal of systemizing things and think for the type of person who loves automating and building systems, I was astounded about the low cost. I would've imagined this kind of setup to cost thousands of euros.
I'm curious about the future of systems like these. We recently saw internet-connected supermarket freezers hacked, so I wonder if internet-connected IoT stuff will be as commonplace in the future.
I have a bunch of plants on my window sill, and considered getting moisture sensors and automating watering, but I realised that kind of defeats the point of looking after the plants myself. On top of the satisfaction of manual work, I recently realised that it's taught me an intuition - the quirks of how much water each plant wants at different times of year (even cacti are thirsty in summer!), and how soil composition and pot size affects water retention. It's probably not generally transferable knowledge, but it was fun to realise I'd come to know my plants really well.
Por que no los dos?
For me, gardening switches between being an old testament god with a spray bottle and a general process god who sets everything in motion, then takes eternity off.
Both are fun, but different kinds of fun.
heressy!
> I can kill any plant
Hum, suddenly you have exactly the most skill wanted in gardening. People will pay for your magic touch on all those stinking needles and weeds out of control. If it works also with moles, people will make queues at your door with marry me proposals.
Maybe I'd feel differently if I didn't have a growing history of plant murder behind me.
> Hum, suddenly you have exactly the most skill wanted in gardening.
Unfortunately, I believe a necessary pre-condition for my skill to work is that you need to have a genuine desire for the plant to survive first.
It seems near certain it will die shortly afterward.
You are though. Its the automation you garden now.
the curse of automation
But we can eat the product of our automated Rube Goldberg gardening automation, while the only thing that Factorio produces in the real world is singing birds.
The fun part of gardening is planting something and watching them grow. I can do that without watering, watering brings me no joy and I still have lots of other things to do in the garden.
Puts the orchard at the shadow.
Near a Parthenocissus
We all had been there. AI is not real I.
Friends don't let friends to be mocked forever by their partners about the smallest pumpkin violin in the world produced with a Lex-Lutor's level plan. If water is guaranteed by sensors, start by moving this raised bed to a sunny place, buddy. Or plant groceries able to climb.
And for Potato's sake, don't brag in front of your family about your smart stuff before to have obtained a decent result. It always ends the same.
The only good part is that this kale will have bigger leaves at the shadow, but bigger and tastier are inversely proportional in gardening.
The part I found interesting: a fixed rules engine for watering kept being wrong in ways that needed context (forecast, last week's response, what the leaves look like). So an agent now runs every morning, reads the full history (4M readings, 62 MB in Iceberg), changes watering within hard limits, and logs what it expects to happen so it can check itself the next day.
Disclosure: the data side runs on LakehouseBox, which I'm building. The code is at github.com/jatorre/garden-lake. Happy to answer anything, including "why not Home Assistant."
This doesn't mean we're against using AI tools, coding agents, etc. We use them heavily ourselves! We just don't want generated or AI-edited text on HN itself. The community feels strongly about this.
Your cabbage looks very healthy and sturdy! Very neat!
But in my gardening experience cabbage is just like that. You sensor setup is at least tomato worthy.
It's particularly bad when someone is just cheerfully sharing a fun project. Having a cement truck drive up and dump a load of denunciatory scolding is no one's idea of a fun thread. Please make your substantive points without any of this. It would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html as well.
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly. Can you please take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop posting like this to Hacker News?
It's clear that you have strong feelings on some (very) general issues, and you have good reasons for that. But picking on other people, especially for something as personal as how they choose to garden, is not an ok way to express yourself on this site.
Let people have some fun, it's not like he is pushing people to abandon manually taking care of a garden.
Not everyone wants to take care of other people’s plants. Maybe he already tried to involve his kids and it turned out they were just not interested.
When did this person's hobby become your property to cast your whims upon?
If you succeed at proving that they're incompetent, incapable, just holding it wrong, or whatever: Then what? How would this finding improve anyone's situation -- at all, anywhere?
My partner would say the plants in our household are mine, because I am responsible for them and they want no part in our responsibility of dealing with their care.
I don't want to be part of a world where people invaded by AI psychosis have turned a basic human thing like gardening into this AI-monstrosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451025
…and maybe stop yucking other people’s yums?
Kids these days want to play on their sega and listen to hip hop.
I for example detest gardening. Spent half of my childhood tending to various practical plants for eating in gardens, centrally planned communism I grew up in couldn't even reliably feed its people. But I love nature, forests, mountains, wilderness. I feel 0 reasons to create a mini plastic artificial version of it around my home, not when I have big wild forest at my doorstep, being at foothills of one mountain range and having heart of European alps in less than 1h drive (ie yesterday hopped to Chamonix in France to check few things and came back).
You gardening people look foolish to me - that massive amount of saved time (and money) means hiking, climbing, via ferratas or skiing / ski alpinism instead, alone or with kids - much better for bonding. While missing 0 of that nature contact. Yet its fine, you do you and I do me, no need punch down on anybody.