Iot and online Services

In case you are already leaning towards including some kind of sensor system for your hydroponically grown plants at home, you may also consider setting up some interface, from which you can smoothly monitor your system parameter. This becomes easily possible, by connecting your controller either to an online server providing an IoT service or to your home network.

For the latter, you can set up a small website only running on your WLAN network, or you take an app interpreting and displaying your data. Both options are firstly a little more complicated, but once you got it you don't have to worry that much about data security or copyrights, which you will when picking one of the other solutions: by connecting your hydroponic system to the world wide web, you will mainly have two option again. With both you will have the advantage to access your data from any device connected to the internet. Either you program all/most by yourself (which may be easy for someone working in this field, but will take y0u months to set up as beginner) including server (backend), database, and user interface (frontend). Or you send your data to some IoT service (like the app Blynk or the online IoT service Thingspeak), which allows you to interpret and visualize your system parameter.

Non of these solutions are easily managed when starting without knowledge about programming. But if you are still up for some adventure, connecting to the Blynk app for mobile devices or sending your data to your local network are definitely more beginner friendly. Additionally, you will find plenty instructions for these tasks, covering many different devices. On the contrary, if you have some knowledge about programming and are very tech-affine, you might consider using the other options mentioned, which allow you more personalization and freedom. 

Thingspeak is an open to use cloud based IoT platform for live data analysis and manipulation [34]. Creating an account gives you the possibility to open your own private (only you can access your data streams) or public so-called channels, in which you process the data. Thingspeak is provided by Mathworks, hence allowing you to react to the channel inputs or just simply displaying your live data on graphs using Matlab, the mathematically oriented programming language [33]. You are free to even create responses sent to your hydroponic controller. Or as used on this webpage, live stream your graphs to another web application. It is pretty easy to use, once you were able to connect your controller correctly. Also, you will find several tutorials on how to include certain functionalities [34].

Blynk is like Thingspeak an open to use cloud based IoT platform for live data analysis and manipulation, but they focused on apps for mobile devices [8]. Hence, you will be able to bring your live sensor data from you hydroponic system to your Android or IOS smartphone. Blynk says, you will be able to set up your first application within 5 minutes [8]. This may be true if you already have knowledge in this area, but will also not take much longer if you do not – their instructions are very clear and available for most controllers. And as soon as your controller is connected, you just download the app from the app store and drag and drop all live visualization elements you desire to your monitoring page, link each of these elements to a sensor of yours and there you go.

Jimdo is a service to create your own website using their modular design system [29]. It is very easy to use and requires non programming skills, when staying with the modules offered; when trying to implement custom reactions to user input or to visualize live data (what you probably want to when using Jimdo for displaying your hydroponic system's data), you will have to use the HTML and CSS options "for experts" to change the ready-to-use modules to your desires [29]. Hence, it is somehow a version in between the service Blynk is offering and option to program all by yourself: you will be limited to some extend, as you have no direct capabilities to save data on a data base with Jimdo directly nor are you able to include all frameworks and libraries you would like to with your own server. Nonetheless, you will have your modern-looking website up in no time.

Only completely free on realizing your ideas and desires you will be by programming your own server or your own app. Of course, this is also the most programming intensive task and will take you at least several days, if you are a professional, or up to maybe a year, if you are a beginner but still have high expectations. There are many different possible approaches for your specific project, including various programming languages, frameworks and libraries. Nonetheless, to give you some ideas what will wait for you when going this route, here the main programming languages and frameworks for your very own app or server and webpage:

App:

• Swift (IOS) or Java, respectively (Android) as programming languages
• Mainly C, C# and C++ for frameworks and libraries

Server and Webpage:

• HTML, CSS, Javascript, Typescript,  PHP or Python as programming languages for front- and backend next to any data base (like MongoDB, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, OracleDB and others)
• Frameworks like Angular JS, Express, React, Node, Asp, Symfony, Django, Rails and others

Link to References