Looking for a use-case for IoT, or maybe Apps in Teams? Or both? Me too! About three years ago I made a little greenhouse in my garden. And for a long time I have wanted to have controll over temperatures inside, so I’ve finally made myself this little Greenhouse IoT project to tacle:

Inside of this greenhouse there are a lot of things growing, including Tomatoes, cucumbers and some herbs:

The purpose of a greenhouse is to have a steady as possible climate for these vegetables. But how can I know how hot it is, or if it’s getting too cold inside this greenhouse? I can manually look at a thermometer but that means I need to get out an check once in a while. And this doesn’t work when I’m away for a length at a time. I need to track the temperature digitally somewhere to see the history, and maybe get some alerts if it gets too hot or too cold? Maybe this is the use case I’ve been looking for?

Luckily I do have access to some tools that may be solving this issue for me. The solution I’ve come up with includes an ESP32-board, connect this to the cloud somehow and create an app in Teams to both notify me and show me the data I want. Great plan! But it’s not that simple and not something I can throw together in a day.

This will be a journey for me in technologies and concepts i either don’t know at all or I want to use to a greater extent than I do today. I’ve never created a Teams-app before, so this can be interesting!

Greenhouse IoT project – a blog series:

I need to break this project down into separate parts, and therefore I will create one blog post for each one. The parts will be:

1. Setup the IoT hardware in the greenhouse
2. Configure my homelab running Home Assistant
3. Connect to Azure and create a stream of data
4. Collect and store this data in a smart way
5. Create an app for Microsoft Teams to interact with the stored data

These steps will become links to the corresponding parts when they are ready. So hopefully I can get where I want by following these steps. But look out for possible changes to scope and/or technologies used here. Speaking of, the Greenhouse IoT project will utilize this stack of technologies:

• ESP32 with sensors, powered by solars cells perhaps?
• Locally hosted Home Assistant
• Docker container running ESPHome locally
• Azure Event Hub integration in Home Assistant talking directly to the cloud
• Power Automate
• Dataverse
• Microsoft Teams with a custom App

Can we make this work? Well… we will find out, I guess?

Links to resources explaining some stuff:

• ESP32 Microcontroller
• ESPHome controller software for ESP32
• Home Assistant
• Azure Event Hub
• Dataverse
• Microsoft Teams Apps