Hydroponics IoT Automation
ESP32-driven irrigation and lighting automation for vertical farms and grow setups. Device-agnostic relay control over standard socket panels, MQTT through HiveMQ Cloud, telemetry landed in S3. SMU BIG grant funded. Showcased to Ministers Indranee Rajah and Desmond Lee at World Cities Summit 2024.
Context
Hydroponics in Singapore is a small market. Most of the activity sits on the supply side: selling grow racks to hobbyists and schools at low margin. There isn't a real ecosystem of funded operators beyond that.
Osiris was an attempt to push past the rack itself. Smart vertical farming: daily irrigation and lighting on automatic cycles, device-agnostic relay control so anything plugged into a normal socket could be toggled remotely, and the operator only pulled in when something needed attention.
My role
Founder. Recruited the core team out of SMU and split the work across hardware, firmware, and cloud. On the build side I owned the hardware design, the ESP32 firmware, and the cloud pipeline up through the HiveMQ broker into S3. Outside the build I ran the SMU BIG grant pitch, led the conversations with the farmers we were selling into, and ran the booth at World Cities Summit 2024 where we demoed to Ministers Indranee Rajah and Desmond Lee.
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 controller in a roughly 20×20 cm enclosure, mounted next to the rack. Wi-Fi to the local router.
- Relay switches wired to a standard socket panel: anything plugged into the panel (pump, light, fan, anything off a wall socket) becomes remotely toggleable. A hand-built device-agnostic smart plug strip.
- Local daily schedule on the device so the rig keeps running if the cloud is unreachable. Telemetry pushed up over MQTT through HiveMQ Cloud, then landed in AWS S3.
- Web dashboard for the operator 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 pivoted away from a packaged hydroponics product into a systems-integrator model. Now it builds custom IoT systems for clients in industries like construction.