Tutorial: Monitoring soil moisture with AWS IoT and Raspberry Pi

This tutorial shows you how to use a Raspberry Pi, a moisture sensor, and AWS IoT to monitor the soil moisture level for a house plant or garden. The Raspberry Pi runs code that reads the moisture level and temperature from the sensor and then sends the data to AWS IoT. You create a rule in AWS IoT that sends an email to an address subscribed to an Amazon SNS topic when the moisture level falls below a threshold.

Note

This tutorial might not be up to date. Some references might have been superseded since this topic was originally published.

Contents

• Prerequisites
• Setting up AWS IoT
  • Step 1: Create the AWS IoT policy
  • Step 2: Create the AWS IoT thing, certificate, and private key
  • Step 3: Create an Amazon SNS topic and subscription
  • Step 4: Create an AWS IoT rule to send an email
• Setting up your Raspberry Pi and moisture sensor

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you need:

• An AWS account.

• An IAM user with administrator permissions.

• A development computer running Windows, macOS, Linux, or Unix to access the AWS IoT console.

• A Raspberry Pi 3B or 4B running the latest Raspbian OS. For installation instructions, see Installing operating system images on the Rasberry Pi website.

• A monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Wi-Fi network or Ethernet connection for your Raspberry Pi.

• A Raspberry Pi-compatible moisture sensor. The sensor used in this tutorial is an Adafruit STEMMA I2C Capacitive Moisture Sensor with a JST 4-pin to female socket cable header.