Hydroponics IoT Automation
ESP32-driven irrigation and lighting automation for hydroponic SMEs. AWS S3 data pipeline. SMU BIG grant funded. Showcased to Ministers Indranee Rajah and Desmond Lee at World Cities Summit 2024.
Context
Hydroponic SMEs in Singapore are run by tight teams with thin margins. Irrigation and lighting are still mostly manual or run on dumb timers, which means crop loss when pumps fail overnight and over-watering when conditions shift.
Osiris was a product attempt at the smallest useful thing: a controller that automates the daily cycle and tells the operator when something is off, without forcing them to learn a dashboard.
My role
Founder. I owned the hardware design, firmware, cloud pipeline, and the conversations with farmers. I led the funding pitch and the booth at World Cities Summit. The architectural decisions and the trade-offs are mine.
Funding and validation
Funded by the SMU BIG (Business Innovations Generator) acceleration grant out of SMU IIE. Featured in Singapore Business Review's list of nine SMU student ventures to watch.
Architecture
- ESP32-based controller with relays for the irrigation pumps and the LED grow lights. Local daily schedule on the device so the rig keeps running if the cloud is unreachable.
- Telemetry pushed up to AWS S3. Cheap, simple, and good enough for the early scale.
- Web dashboard for the farmers to monitor crop view, the daily cycle, and any alerts.
Showcase moments
- World Cities Summit 2024 at the SMU IIE booth. Demoed Osiris to Ministers Indranee Rajah and Desmond Lee.
- Featured in Singapore Business Review.
- Internal demo at SMU IIE for the BIG cohort.
Where it stands
Osiris kept going in a different shape. The original hydroponics product stopped shipping, but the company pivoted to a systems-integrator-style consulting model for custom IoT builds.
The original platform (ESP32 controller, cloud pipeline, dashboard) ended up reusable across domains: the same architecture gets redeployed with different sensors for different problem spaces. The early lessons in firmware reliability, supply chain, and deployment ride along.