Bodewell
Live plant and soil monitoring: sensor sticks in plant pots report soil moisture, air temperature, humidity and light to a dashboard you can open from anywhere.
Bodewell is a fleet of ESP32 sensor sticks and the dashboard that reads them. Each stick wakes, reads a capacitive soil-moisture sensor and air sensors, sends the report over wifi and sleeps again; the dashboard shows every plant live, keeps its history, and judges each reading against the care thresholds for that species.
The hardware
Inside every sensor stick is an ESP32: it wakes up, reads the attached sensors, sends the report over WiFi, and goes back to sleep to save battery.
Moisture is measured by capacitive sensing, which uses an electrical field rather than metal probes that rust. Temperature, humidity and light are tracked alongside it, so a dry plant can be told apart from one that is baking in the sun.
The dashboard
- Live fleet view — A card per sensor rig, updated as readings arrive, with a warning when a rig stops reporting.
- Plant history — Each plant's readings over time, summarised so months stay readable, judged against its species' care thresholds.
- Experiments — Assign a species to a rig and run a timed experiment session.
- Diagnostics — Check the API and the realtime connection the readings arrive over.
- Vision — A camera feed for rigs fitted with an ESP32-CAM.
Built with Ramme
Bodewell is built on Ramme, open source scaffolding for building real apps and desk devices with an AI assistant.