I Gave an AI Agent a Lakehouse and Control of My Garden
I gave an agent a lakehouse and control of my garden
Javier de la Torre turned a two-square-metre vegetable bed into a sensor-packed experiment: eleven Ecowitt sensors, a weather station, and a 4K camera feed data into a LakehouseBox—an Apache Iceberg lakehouse on European infrastructure. Since September, it has collected over four million readings in just 3.22 MB. The agent queries soil moisture, spots dry corners, and even watches for cats using the bed as a toilet. The result? A €60 lettuce.
My garden is going to be sovereign. No one is going to touch my lettuce.
- ryankrage77
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.
- rob74
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...
- FinnLobsien
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.
- brunoarueira
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!
- arjie
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!