Practical Pipelines: A Houseplant Soil Alerting System with ksqlDB By Danica Fine

Houseplants can be hard – in many cases, over- and under-watering can have the same symptoms. Take away the guesswork involved in caring for your houseplants while also gaining valuable experience in building a practical, event-driven pipeline in your own home! This talk explores the process of building a houseplant monitoring and alerting system using a Raspberry Pi and Apache Kafka. Moisture and temperature readings are captured from sensors in the soil and streamed into Kafka. From here, we’ll use stream processing to transform the data, create a summary view of the current state, and drive real-time push alerts through Telegram. In this session, I’ll talk about how I ingest the data followed by the tools – including ksqlDB and Kafka Connect – that help transform the raw data into useful information, and finally I’ll show how to use Kafka Producers and Consumers to make the entire application more interactive. By the end of the talk, you’ll have everything you need to start building practical streaming pipelines in your own home. Roll up your sleeves – let’s get our hands dirty! DANICA FINE Danica Fine is a Senior Developer Advocate at Confluent where she helps others get the most out of Kafka and their event-driven pipelines. In her previous role as a software engineer on a streaming infrastructure team, she predominantly worked on Kafka Streams- and Kafka Connect-based projects to support computing financial market data at scale. She can be found on Twitter, tweeting about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.