Singapore Indoor Farms IoT Showcase
Raspberry Pi rig with DHT22 humidity, a CO2 sensor, and relay-driven control of the grow lights and water pump. Deployed as a single demo rack at an indoor farm on the west coast of Singapore. Featured on Channel News Asia in May 2022.
Context
An indoor farm on the west coast of Singapore wanted a small visible IoT rig they could show clients walking through their facility. Not a full deployment, just one demo rack on their floor to prove the data path end-to-end and let visitors see live readings.
It was a W2 freelance gig during my SP IoT internship era. The scope was deliberately narrow: prove the loop works, show numbers on a screen, let an operator flip a relay.
Stack
- One Raspberry Pi at the rack. GPIO wired to a DHT22 humidity sensor and a separate CO2 sensor.
- Raspberry Pi camera (later iterations swapped in an audio module) for visual monitoring of the rack.
- Relays off the Pi GPIO to switch the grow lights and the water pump on and off.
- A monitoring view so the operator could observe readings and trigger simple notifications. Useful for the demo, not a production platform.
What it did for the customer
The rig was as much a sales tool as a sensor stack. The farm's team used it to walk clients through what data-driven indoor agriculture looks like. CNA picked it up in May 2022 as a Singapore Indoor Farms feature.
What I learned
A small, deliberate scope can outperform a complex one. The same engineering effort spent making a hundred sensors work imperfectly would have been less useful than making one rack actually work in front of clients.
Hardware demos are different from hardware products. The bar for a demo is liveness and legibility on a screen. The bar for a product is the failure modes that show up at 3am.