2023.10.05

Thinger.io for Small IoT Projects.

Using Thinger.io's open-source platform to build a soil moisture dashboard for a rooftop garden — without writing a backend.

IoTESP32Thinger.ioAgriculture

Thinger.io is an IoT platform that lets you connect devices, expose endpoints, and build dashboards without standing up your own backend. I used it for a soil moisture monitoring project on a rooftop garden in Kathmandu.

Why Thinger.io over alternatives

Self-hostable on a cheap VPS — I used a ₹200/month DigitalOcean droplet
Native Arduino and ESP32 library — no REST plumbing
Dashboard builder is genuinely usable, unlike Grafana for small projects
Free tier is enough for one-person projects

ESP32 sketch (core)

#include <ThingerESP32.h>
#define USERNAME "your_username"
#define DEVICE_ID "soil_sensor"
#define DEVICE_CREDENTIAL "your_credential"

ThingerESP32 thing(USERNAME, DEVICE_ID, DEVICE_CREDENTIAL);

void setup() {
  thing["moisture"] >> [](pson& out) {
    out = analogRead(34) / 4095.0 * 100;
  };
  thing.add_wifi("SSID", "password");
}

void loop() { thing.handle(); }

The sensor data streamed at 30-second intervals. Thinger.io's bucket storage kept 30 days of history without any database config on my end.

What the dashboard showed

Live moisture percentage per pot
7-day moisture trend graph
Alert badge when moisture < 30%
Last-watered timestamp derived from moisture spike detection

For production agricultural monitoring, you'd want something more robust. But for a weekend project that needed to actually run reliably, Thinger.io was the right level of abstraction.