Sean's Dead Plants
Automate My Life!Season 1Episode 1November 19 2024Sean loves plants, but he can't stop killing them. Can our crack team of experts save him from his murderous streak?
Speaker 0: Hello, and welcome to Automate My Life. In this show, we help regular people using Directus.
Speaker 1: And today, we are in sunny London with our first person in need, Sean. He has lots of problems. We can't help with most of them, but we certainly can help with 1. Over to Sean. So I'm here with Sean who has called in the Automate My Life team with a problem.
Sean, what can we help you with?
Speaker 2: Hi, Kevin. Thanks for coming. I have a problem. Tell me more. Look at this plant.
What do you notice about it?
Speaker 1: Sean, this plant is dead.
Speaker 2: That is the problem. Okay. Yep. See, I have plants and they are not dead, but then no matter what I do, they become dead. Despite your best efforts.
Despite my best and sometimes your mediocre efforts as well.
Speaker 1: Okay. I understand. Well, I think this is something we might be able to help with over in the workshop.
Speaker 2: Marvelous. Automate my life, Directus team. Over to Beth.
Speaker 0: Okay, folks. You've heard what Sean's problem is. We've brought you here as the best of the best to work out a solution for Sean. The future is plants relies on you. What have you got?
Speaker 3: Hey, Sean. Welcome to the Directus workshopping team. We're all about automating our lives every day. I have a similar problem. My wife my partner, has a pepper garden.
She's an avid gardener. She loves to garden. This year, she actually picked up a little pH temperature monitor or soil tester, to give you the soil quality and quantity and make sure that she could amend the soil properly for those kinds of things. But as I'm thinking about this now, I'd actually like to work with her, and we'll get a I I think next year, I'm actually going to do this particular project. But in the meantime, we'll talk about some of the ways we could solve this problem.
There are both DIY options and aftermarket options. I think I'll opt for the DIY, And that will be using something along the lines of an e s ESP 32 Wi Fi sensor. There's a nice Directus blog that kind of goes through a use case for this. But we're gonna talk a little bit more in detail about some specific sensors and capabilities that we'll need to do for this. So there's an ESP 32.
This has built in WiFi, the ability to integrate that with your sensors and plug that into your sensors, so we can collect data, soil temp moisture contents and, temperatures. So the key thing is to making sure that your plants grow successfully. Now in order to make this all work together to get you alerts and notifications, I'm gonna hand you off to my main automation guru, mister Bryant Gillespie.
Speaker 4: Sorry, Jonathan. I, had these thinking glasses on to consider this problem. I just wanna say this is an amazing use case for direct us flows. We are going to be able to send automated notifications whenever these values are out of bounds. So here's what I'm thinking.
Whenever a new item is created in the logging collection we trigger a flow. That flow does some magic and it will run some conditional operations to determine whether those values for moisture, for pH, for temperature are within the bounds that we set. If they are within those bounds nothing happens. You're a okay Sean. As soon as those values step out of bounds like they're on the court, boom you get a message via SMS through the Twilio API.
And that's a wrap. Now to kick it over to my main man, AvDV, our head of insights.
Speaker 5: Hey, Sean. If you're anything like me and you've got a lot of plants, I can imagine all these sensors are gonna be bringing in a ton of data into your into your director's project. So what better way to use insights or our dashboards to build up, targeted, insights, which give you a summary of all the information in one page. We have, time series charts that you can start to track the pH, the moisture, and the temperature over time. And with built in filters as well, you can you can filter by room, by particular plants, or even by the season if you wanna track, the growth or the moisture over the seasons.
There's a ton more use cases that we could build in, but those are just good. Some 3 quick summaries of what you could build with the direct us insights.
Speaker 0: Wow. This all sounds great. I'm gonna leave you in the workshop to make this real. So, Sean, we built you a soil monitor. There's sensors in here that every hour monitor the status of the plant.
And if it's in need, we'll let you know via text messages exactly what's wrong.
Speaker 2: Wow. That's amazing. I'll never kill again. Thanks, directors.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. What a wonderful first episode of Automate My Life. Thank you for taking part. If you have an idea for a future episode, you can probably keep it to yourself. This is probably a one and done.
Thank you, and bye for now.