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I Built a Plant Monitoring and Control System Using ESP32 & Blynk IoT
Tarun Chandragiri13 min read·Just now--
How a simple monitoring idea evolved into a dual-board IoT project
Most IoT tutorials start with everything going right. This one doesn’t.
I burned an LCD and a relay in the same moment— wrong voltage, zero warning, instant regret. That single mistake rewrote the entire architecture of this project.
I wanted to see how far I could go with what I already had. No new components, no shopping list. Using an ESP32, an ESP8266, and Blynk IoT, I built a system that monitors temperature, humidity, and soil moisture in real time, and controls a water pump and fans, all from one app on my phone. Two boards, two power sources, one unified dashboard.
Working with what I had is also why things went wrong. And why the final design is more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
Everything I learned — including what not to do — is in this article.
How Does the ESP32 Know What Your Plant Needs?
One ESP32 handles everything on the monitoring side — reading data from sensors, displaying it live on a local LCD screen, and streaming it to the Blynk app over WiFi. Here’s how each piece fits together.
