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 Some references might have been superseded since this topic was originally published.

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 Raspberry Pi OS. For installation instructions, see Install an operating system on the Raspberry 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.

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Document Conventions

Creating a custom authorizer for AWS IoT Core

Setting up AWS IoT

Tutorial: Monitoring soil moisture with AWS IoT and Raspberry Pi

Note

Contents

Prerequisites